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The Small Voice
of History

RANAJIT GUHA

The Small Voice
of History

Collected Essays

p e rin i n <■ * n t b I s c. k

Published by
PERMANENT BLACK

D-28 Oxford Apartments, 1 1, I.P. Extension,
Delhi 110092

Distributed by
ORIENT LONGMAN LTD
Bangalore Bhubaneshwar Kolkata Chandigarh
Chennai Ernakulam Guwahati Hyderabad Jaipur
Lucknow Mumbai New Delhi Patna

First published in India 2002

Typeset in Agaramond

by Guru Typograph Technology, Dwarka, New Delhi 1 10075
Printed and bound by Pauls Press, New Delhi 1 10020

Contents

Editors Acknowledgements ix

Editors Introduction 1

Part I: Rules of Property 19

1 A.n Administrative Blueprint of 1785 21

2 Introduction to the Burdwan District Records

1788-1800 36

3 Report on an Investigation of the Gauripur

Raj Estate Archives 83

4 Rent in Kind and Money Rent in Eastern India under

Early British Rule 94

5 Graft, Greed, and Perfidy 116

6 The Agrarian History of Northern India 119

Part II: Subaltern Histories 125

7 Neel Darpam The Image of a Peasant Revolt in a

Liberal Mirror 127

8 Five Villages 184

9 On Some Aspects of the Historiography of

Colonial India 187

10 The Prose of Counter-Insurgency 194

1 1 The Career of an Anti-God in Heaven and on Earth 239

12 The Millenarian Space 266

Contents

13 Chandra’s Death 271

1 4 The Small Voice of History 304

1 5 Introduction to the Subaltern Studies Reader 318

16 Writing the Past Where Generations Meet 333

1 7 Subaltern Studies: Projects for Our Time and

Their Convergence 346

18 Gramsci in India: Homage to a Teacher 361

Part III: The Two Histories

of Empire 371

19 A Conquest Foretold 373

20 The Advent of Punctuality 391

21 A Colonial City and its Time(s) 409

22 Sir William Jones 433

23 Europe and the Exotic 438

24 Not at Home in Empire 44 1

25 Introducing an Anthropologist among the Historians 455

26 The Authority of Vernacular Pasts 474

27 A Construction of Humanism in Colonial India 479

Pari IV: The Promise of Nationhood 493

28 The Mahatma and the Mob 495

29 The Movement for National Freedom in India 504

30 Nationalism Reduced to ‘Official Nationalism’ 512

31 Nationalism and the Trials of Becoming 520

32 Foreword to the ‘Gita’ 534

33 Coping with the Excess of History 539

Part V: Democracy Betrayed 553

34 Teen-Age Wage Slavery in India 555

35 On Torture and Culture 560

Contents

vii

Indian Democracy: Long Dead, Now Buried

577

Knowing India by its Prisons

598

Calcutta Diary

609

Two Campaigns

612

On Naming a New Aspiration

629

Part VI: Exile

633

The Tartar s Cry

635

The Migrant s Time

644

The Turn

652

Translating between Cultures

659

Editor s Acknowledgements

This volume brings together Ranajit Guha’s English essays that
have not been included in any of the books authored by
him. He has also published in Bengali: those essays remain un-
translated.

This book was put together with the help of many. The staff of the
library of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, especially
Sanchita Bhattacharya, Saumitra Chatterjee, and Siddhartha Ray;
Kainalika Mukherjee of the Hitesranjan Sanyal Memorial Archives;
Kali Prasad Bose and Anupam Chatterjee of the Jadunath Sarkar
Resource Centre for Historical Research; and Jennifer Johnson at
Columbia University, were enormously helpful with tracking down
and reproducing the material included here. Ashutosh Kumar of the
Department of History, Delhi University, valiantly retrieved and
transcribed Ranajit Guha’s earliest published essay from the collections
of Ajoy Bhavan, New Delhi. Anil Acharya, Moinak Biswas, Anjan
Ghosh, and Rudrangshu Mukherjee gave valuable bibliographic help.
Shahid Amin, Gautam Bhadra, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, my colleagues
in Subaltern Studies, have helped as always with material, suggestions,
and friendly encouragement. My greatest debt is to Mechthild Guha
who has rifled through coundess drawers, bookshelves, and packing
boxes to seek out old offprints and frayed manuscripts, checked dates
and references, and supported this effort in the most resolute way pos-
sible. 1 am also immensely grateful to Ranajit Guha himself who, des-
pite his debilitating illness, cheerfully answered all my queries. The
idea of this volume came from Rukun Advani who — alongside the late
P.K. Ghosh of Eastend Printers in Calcutta — saw Guha’s Elementary
Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India ( 1 983) through the press,
and who has been from the start involved as a publisher with Subaltern

Editors Acknowledgements

Studies', it is appropriate that he has now successfully transformed this
particular publishing inspiration into a real book.

Copyright over the essays is held by Ranajit Guha and is shown as
such, in the required format, as the first footnote on the opening page
of each essay along with the source of first publication. As a matter of
courtesy these sources of first publication — wherever addresses were
available and the publisher/publication not defunct — have been
informed. Should any omissions in this regard be brought to notice,
they will be rectified in subsequent printings.

Editor s Introduction

Partha Chattertee

Ranajit Guha is arguably the one Indian historian whose historical
writings have had the widest impact on contemporary scholar-
ly ship in several disciplines throughout the world. His work has
had a formative influence on what is known as postcolonial studies
in literature, anthropology, history, cultural studies, art history, and
other disciplines. He is cited as the practitioner of a critical Marxist
historiography that ran parallel to the work of the famous British and
French Marxist historians of the 1960s and 1970s but which, instead
of recreating a ‘history from below’, sought an active political engage-
ment with the postcolonial present by creatively employing insights
drawn from Antonio Gramsci and Mao Zedong. In recent years, his
writings have been noticed for their attention to the phenomenological
and the everyday and for a sustained critique of the disciplinary
practices of history writing. His worldwide reputation largely rests on
his role as founder and guiding spirit of Subaltern Studies , the series of
essays and monographs launched in 1982 that took up the critique
of both the colonialist and nationalist historiographies of modern
South Asia. Even though he gave up the editorship of the series in
1989, his name has remained firmly associated with the distinctive
approach and impact of Subaltern Studies . His other historical and
political writings, dating from the 1 950s and tucked away in relatively
obscure journals and collections, are little known outside a small group
of Indian historians.

Not that Guha was ever a prolific writer. His essays bear the mark
of profound and wide-ranging scholarship, close and intense analyti-
cal work, deliberately chosen rhetorical effects and a singularly careful

The Small Voice of History

attention to the craft of writing. For the most part, he has been a slow
and measured writer. This was facilitated by his determined refusal to
succumb to the usual pressures of academic life that prompt most
scholars to publish with a view to improving their curriculum vitae
and achieving professional success. Indeed, given his enormous repu-
tation today, it is quite astonishing to discover how little recognition
Guha received in the academy during his professional life, almost all
of the honours and distinctions coming to him after his retirement.
His researches were not separately funded, nor did he ever have re-
search assistants. Even as his writings are appreciated today in a global
academy where historians routinely work with digitized archives,
electronic publications, and video conferences, Guha formed his own
code of scholarly ethics by drawing upon the practices of a world of
learning that has long disappeared.

Critique of Origins

Ranajit Guha was born in 1923 in a village called Siddhakati in the
erstwhile district of Bakarganj, now in Bangladesh.1 Bakarganj, com-
monly referred to as Barisal, following the name of the principal
district town, is distinguished for many reasons, not all of them
complimentary. It is located in the deltaic coastal region of southern
Bengal and is crisscrossed by innumerable rivers and rivulets, the
southernmost parts being covered by the dense mangrove forests of
the Sundarban. For most of the twentieth ccntuiy transpoi cation in
Bakarganj was almost entirely by water, because it was one of those
rare districts in British India not to possess a single mile of railway.
The northern parts of rhe district, however, consisted of fertile rice
fields, much of the land having been cleared of forests and settled
only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Most of the landlords
were upper-caste Hindus — Brahmin, Kayastha, or Baidya — who had
moved into Bakarganj in the eighteenth century from the Bikrampur
region of Dhaka and Faridpur. A distinctive feature of landlordism in

1 The date 1922, given in Shahid Amin and Gautam Bhadra, ‘Ranajit
Guha: A Biographical Sketch’, in David Arnold and David Hardiman, eds,
Subaltern Studies Mil (Delhi : Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 222-5, is in-
correct.

Editors Introduction

Bakarganj was the immense and intricate structure of what economic
historians call subinfeudation. The rent-collecting right of the
zamindar of an estate would be divided and handed down to a second
tier of intermediate tenure-holders, each of whom would further
subdivide and hand down the right to a third tier of intermediaries,
and so on, until one reached the actual cultivators of the land. J.C.
Jack, settlement officer of Bakarganj in the early twentieth century,
sketched the following chart to represent a typical picture of subin-
feudation in the district:

zamindar of estate of 2000 acres, paying revenue Rs 200

4 talukdars, each with tenure of 500 acres paying rent Rs 1 00

20 osat talukdars, each with tenure of 1 00 acres paying rent Rs 50

80 haoladars, each with tenure of 25 acres paying rent Rs 25

1 60 nim haoladars, each with tenure of 1 2Vi acres paying rent Rs 20

320 raiyats, each with holding of 6lA acres paying rent Rs 152

This meant that out of a total rent of Rs 4800 paid by 320 holders
of raiyati or cultivating rights, after deducting the government reve-
nue of Rs 200, a net rent income of Rs 4600 was divided between
265 rentiers. As it happened, the ladder of rent-collecting interests did
not stop with the raiyat , because he too would frequently let out his
holding to subtenants (or under-raiyats) for rents in cash or produce.
Although subinfeudation was a common feature of the agrarian eco-
nomy all over British Bengal, it was generally agreed that its form was
the most extreme in Bakarganj.

2 J.C. Jack, Final Report on the Survey and Settlement Operations in the
Bakarganj District (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Book Depot, 1915), p. 52.

The Small Voice of History

As is evident from Jacks report, the rent collected from the culti-
vator was distributed quite thinly among many intermediate tenure-
holders. But the legal rents were invariably supplemented by a host
of illegal exactions called abwab which often amounted to as much as
30 per cent of the rent. Many of these had become customary pay-
ments to the overlord on the occasion of religious and social festivals,
but others were utterly arbitrary, imposed to meet additional expenses
in the landlord s household (such as buying a motor car or paying for
a sons education abroad), and a few reflected the cultural prejudi-
ces of upper-caste Hindu landlords, such as a tax on the marriage of
a Muslim widow or on the entry of a Hindu widow into prostitu-
tion. Besides, there was the widespread practice of begar or unpaid
labour in the houses or fields of the landlord. While continued use
over generations may have turned the illegal exactions, and the right
to claim them, into customary practices, there was clearly a bedrock of
coercion, including the ever-present threat and frequent use ofviolence,
on which the whole structure was founded. This was particularly
symbolized by the power exercised by landlords to impose fines on
their tenants for a variety of offences and infractions. A few extracts
from the diary of a Bakarganj landlord touring his estate are revealing:

Ordered Rohimuddi to shoe-beat Hazari Khan as all the tenants sus-
pect him to be the thief, but he does not confess his guilt . . . Retired
for the night: God save me from all troubles in the night and bless
me for the next morning so that T may realize money in abundance as
miscellaneous receipt . . . Last night passed order that no Muham-
madan . . . shall be able to go and sit at the houses of Namasudras
or other Hindu tenants, and the Hindus are forbidden to allow the
Muhammadans to sit at their houses. If any of them found is dis-
obeying will be fined Rs 25 without any evidence. . . .There is a charge
against Ishan Haidar that he is in love with his own mother-in-law. . . .
The witnesses are matbors and reliable persons and when they all say
it to be true, I also believe them and order that the muchlika of Rs 50
be realized from Ishan Haidar. . . . Got Rs 10 as nazar at Karapur, still
all the tenants did not come. Miscellaneous — Rs 33 only.3

3 Jack, Final Report , pp. 81-2.

Editor's Introduction

The Guha family of Siddhakati had a middle-sized talukdari. How-
ever, it was a khas talukdari whose annual rent was paid directly to
the government and not to a superior zamindar. This was something
of a peculiarity of the Bakarganj land system, produced, as Tapan
Raychaudhuri has explained, by the tenurial arrangements that pre-
vailed in the region in the pre-British Nawabi period.4 The family also
appended, as a supplement to their Kayastha surname Guha, the
honorific title Bakshi, indicating some bureaucratic rank going back
to Nawabi times. The combination of khas talukdari with the title
Bakshi gave rise, Guha remembers, to grandiose pretensions among
some elders in his family to being zamindars in deed if not in
acknowledged fact.5 Siddhakati did have its own zamindar, of course —
the Baidya family of the Raychaudhuris — who lived in the largest
brick-built house in the village and patronized the Kali temple, and
one of whom, Girija Shankar, was a literary critic who had written a
book on Bankimchandra s novels which even that great author, known
for his elevated tastes and caustic pen, had praised.6

By the early 1930s, when Guha was attending the village school,
zamindaris in eastern Bengal were already in a state of irreversible
decline. Only a decade or so earlier, colonial officials had spoken of
able-bodied idlers of the bhadralok or respectable classes, who are not
driven to employment by the spur of want and are content to maintain
themselves on the profits of their tenures/7 But the slowly burgeoning
campaign against zamindari oppression suddenly burst forth in the
early 1 930s when the effects of the worldwide depression hit the jute
economy of eastern Bengal. The new Krishak Praja movement was at
the fore of a sustained refusal by peasants to pay rents to landlords or
to repay loans to moneylenders. Given the demography of the region,

4 Tapan Raychaudhuri, ‘Permanent Settlement in Operation: Bakarganj
District, East Bengal’, in Robert Eric Frykenberg, ed., Land Control and Social
Structure in Indian History (New Delhi: Manohar, 1979), pp. 163-74.

5 Ranajit Guha, ‘Chirasthayi bandobaster sutrapat: kaiphiyaf , Aitihasik ,
January 2007, pp. 1-9.

Rohinikumar Sen, Bakla (1915) in Kamal Chaudhuri, ed., Brihattara
bakarganjer itihas (Kolkata: Deys, 2002), pp. 204-6, 247-8.

7 Jack, Final Report , p. 59.

6 The Small Voice of History

with landlordism being associated with upper-caste Hindu cultural
dominance and the majority of peasants being Muslim, the movement
took on communal overtones. There was a series of violent attacks
on Hindu landlords and moneylenders in several districts of eastern
Bengal, followed in many cases by Hindu retaliation on Muslims.8 9
Landlordism in Bengal was entering a terminal crisis.

Still not in his teens, the village boy Ranajit could not have been
aware of any of these larger historical processes. His father, Radhika
Ranjan Guha, was a successful lawyer in Calcutta, as a result of which,
despite the falling rent incomes, his family was well off in comparison
with others in the village. Ranajit s companions were mostly from the
low-caste tenant families of the neighbourhood (in todays terminology,
they would be called Dalit). He spent his days with them — playing,
swimming, or climbing trees — ignorant of social hierarchies in the
blissfully egalitarian kingdom of children. When he came home, he
would hear his elders refer to his friends as the children of the praja .
‘The word has remained’, wrote Guha many years later, ‘like the stain
of some primordial sin, a perennial companion to all my thoughts.’1*
As he grew to adolescence, he began to notice that the parents of some
of his playmates would come to the house to work, and would refer
to his elders as munib (master), never sit down in their presence,
touch the feet of even the youngest ‘master’, and stand in silence when
scolded. Was this how he and his young friends were destined to
behave towards one another when they grew up? A question began
to take shape in his mind.

In 1934, the young Ranajit was sent to Calcutta to enter secondary
school. The new sensations and experiences were overwhelming. The

8 Partha Chatterjee; Bengal 1920-1947: The Land Question (Calcutta: K.P.
Bagchi, 1984); Sugata Bose; Agrarian Bengal: Economy Social Structure and
Politics , 1919-1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Suranjan
Das, Communal Riots in Bengal 1905-1947 (Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1991); Joya Chatterji, Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition,
1932-1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Pradip Kumar
Datta, Carving Blocs: Communal Ideology in Early Twentieth-Century Bengal
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999).

9 Guha, ‘Chirasthayi bandobasta: kaiphiyat’, p. 4. My translation.

Editors Introduction

attractions of the village faded quickly. Mitra Institution on Harrison
Road was famed for its academic excellence. Guha finished school
creditably and, in 1938, entered Presidency College, the premier
undergraduate college in Bengal. Soon he was drawn to the Commu-
nist Party.

The radicalization of young middle-class intellectuals in this critical
period in Bengal's history, marked by the Second World War, the
devastating famine of 1 943, the unprecedented violence of communal
conflicts in 1946, and the partition of the province in 1947, is worth
remarking on. The earlier attraction of the revolutionary nationalist
groups, committed to secret organization and assassination of British
officials, had waned. The 1930s had seen a flood of recruits from col-
leges and universities responding to Gandhi s call for civil disobedience
and rural mobilization. There was a similar politicization of Muslim
students from eastern Bengal coming to Calcutta: many now became
the voice of the demand of the praja, mostly Muslim peasants, for an
end to the zamindari system instituted by the Permanent Settlement
a hundred and fifty years earlier.10 And now there was a small but
expanding group of young communists.

The victory of Fazlul Huqs Krishak Praja Party in 1936 and the
formation of a coalition government with the Muslim League the fol-
lowing year resulted in the appointment of a commission, led by Fran-
cis Floud who had just concluded an inquiry into the land system in
Ireland, to pronounce on whether or not the Permanent Settlement
in Bengal should be terminated. The report of the commission was
published in 1940, in which it recommended the abolition of the
zamindari system based on the Permanent Settlement. Guha was then
an undergraduate at Presidency College. He remembers coming upon
the six-volume report of the Floud Commission in his fathers study
and eagerly reading the evidence submitted by the Bengal Provincial
Kisan Sabha, the peasant wing of the Communist Party. Needless to
say, Bankim Mukherjee, Rebati Burman, Abdullah Rasul, and Bhowani
Sen, on behalf of the Kisan Sabha, had launched a searing criticism of
the Permanent Settlement, calling it the foundation of all forms of

10 The classic account is in Abul Mansur Ahmad, Amur dekha rajnitir pan -
chas bachhar (Dhaka: Nowroze Kitabistan, 1970).

8 The Small Voice of History

oppression of cultivators in Bengal. 1 1 The question that had been sown
in a child’s mind now acquired the form of a political position.

In college, Guha busied himself in the work of organizing among
students on behalf of the Communist Party. Their support for the
Allied war effort and opposition to the Quit India movement of 1942
had left the communists isolated. But Guha came under the mentor-
ship of Susobhan Chandra Sarkar, the celebrated Professor of History
at Presidency College who secredy belonged to the Communist Party.
Although Guha’s political activities left him with litde time or motiva-
tion to attend to the university curriculum, thus leading him to a
routine graduation without honours, he did manage to enter, under
the guidance of Professor Sarkar, a new world of politically engaged
historical scholarship that he could never have found in the university.
His earliest ‘research paper’ was written for the students’ magazine of
the Communist Party and is reproduced in this volume (‘Teen-Age
Wage Slavery in India). He took a Master’s degree with a First Class
in History in 1946 from the University of Calcutta and, as a whole-
time member, joined the staff of Swadhinata , the Communist Party
daily. The following year, he was selected to represent the Communist
Party of India in Paris at the secretariat of the World Federation of
Democratic Youth.

For the next six years Guha was based in Paris, organizing events,
building networks, and travelling, often under false identities, in
Eastern Europe, West Asia, and North Africa. One of his colleagues on
the secretariat was Enrico Berlinguer who would later become leader
of the Italian Communist Party in its Eurocommunist phase. A mem-
orable event was travelling by train across Siberia to China, only a
few months after the revolution, an episode recounted at length
by Mohit Sen, a younger comrade who had also been a student of
Susobhan Sarkar at Presidency College, Calcutta. 12 During a period of
stay in Poland, Guha married his first wife Marta, a Polish-Jewish
communist.

1 1 Memorandum by the Bengal Provincial Kisan Sabha and their Oral Evid-
ence, Report of the Land Revenue Commission Bengal , vol. 6 (Alipore: Bengal
Government Press, 1940), pp. 3-72.

12 Mohit Sen, A Traveller and the Road: The Journey of an Indian Communist
(New Delhi: Rupa, 2001), pp. 79-86.

Editors Introduction

Returning to India in 1 953, Guha entered an academic career while
continuing his life as a member of the Communist Party. He taught
at Vidyasagar College, Central Calcutta College, and Chandernagore
College, and in 1 958 joined the newly established History Department
at Jadavpur University at the invitation of Susobhan Sarkar. Two years
earlier, in 1 956, he had left the Communist Party in protest against the
Soviet invasion of Hungary. He frequented the archives and the
question that had stayed with him from his days in a Barisal village,
asserted for a time as a political position, now began to be honed into
the shape of a research problem.

Ranajit Guha’s researches from this period would in the end lead to
his classic work A Rule of Property far Bengal , published from Petris in
1 963. 13 But the book was long in the making. Some of the preparatory
archival and theoretical work can be seen from the essays published
by him in the 1950s (included in this volume). In trying to construct
a historically informed critique of the zamindari system he had
experienced in his childhood and which had just been abolished in
both halves of Bengal, Guha was drawn not so much by the intricately
evolving and complex practices of landed property as by the original
ideas that went into the framing of the Permanent Settlement of 1 793.
His project took shape from the posing of a paradox.

Physiocratic thought, the precursor of Political Economy, was an im-
placable critique of feudalism in its native habitat and proved to be a
real force in undermining the ancien regime. Ironically, however, while
being grafted to India by the most advanced capitalist power of that
age, it became instrumental in building a neo-feudal organization of
landed property and in the absorption and reproduction of pre-
capitalist elements in a colonial regime. In other words, a typically
bourgeois form of knowledge was bent backwards to admit itself to the
relations of power in a semi-feudal society.14

This effort by a young aspirant to a doctoral degree in Calcutta
to turn a major topic of Indian economic history into a problem of

1 3 Ranajit Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Perma-
nent Settlement (Pins: Mouton, 1963).

14 ‘Preface to Second Edition , in Guha, Rule of Property (New Delhi: Orient
Longman, 1982).

1 0 The Small Voice of History

European intellectual history did not meet with approval from his
superiors in the academy. Guhas fledgling research was severely
criticized by the defenders of the new orthodoxy of nationalist
economic history. Indeed, the recent renewal of interest in A Rule of
Propertyy more than three decades after its first publication, shows that
it had appeared well before its time. 1 5 The argument that the produc-
tion of colonial difference was not merely an aberrant outlier but lay
at the very heart of the emergence of Western modernity itself, and
was intrinsic to the formation of the modern forms of social knowledge,
including Political Economy, Comparative Government, and Inter-
national Law, is only now beginning to be heard seriously. Guhas early
researches into the intellectual origins of the Permanent Settlement
blazed a trail that only a later generation of scholars would follow.

Critique of the Present

When India won independence from British rule on 1 5 August 1 947,
Ranajit Guha, the young communist, was not prepared for any joyous
celebration of the event. The bitter memories of communal riots in the
city were still too fresh and proximate. Needless to say, he accepted as
axiomatic that colonial subjection must end and a regime of republican
citizenship based on popular sovereignty must begin. But the squabbles
and bickering among politicians, leading to a transfer of power accom-
panied by Partition and violence, did not create a sense of confidence
in the national leadership. From the first day oi the life of the new
nation-state, Guha knew that its list of achievements would be out-
stripped by a longer list of failed promises.16

Curiously, soon after Guha left for Europe in 1947, his father
Radhika Ranjan made an unusual reverse journey by agreeing to
become a judge of the newly established Dacca High Court. Radhika
Ranjan was a friend of another, far more famous, Barisal lawyer A.K.
Fazlul Huq. Ranajit Guha remembers the formidable Huq Saheb
visiting his father at their house on Musaimanpara Lane in central
Calcutta. Perhaps it was at the persuasion of Fazlul Huq that Radhika

1 A new edition of the book appeared in 1 9 96 from Duke University Press.

16 Ranajit Guha interviewed by Utpalkumar Basu, ‘Dabi theke pratibad,
pratibad theke pratirodh’, Anandabajar Patrika , 1 5 August 2007.

Editors Introduction

Ranjan Guha travelled in a direction contrary to the usual pattern of
post-Partition migration in Bengal. Ranajit s elder brother, Debaprasad,
soon to emerge as a noted scholar of Pali and Buddhism, took up a
teaching position in Rangoon.

No longer active in politics and frustrated in his efforts to pursue
doctoral research in Calcutta, Ranajit Guha took up a fellowship at the
University of Manchester in 1959. At this time his marriage with
Marta broke up. He was to spend the next two decades in Britain,
first at Manchester and then at the University of Sussex. Although A
Rule of Property was received with respect, Guha chose not to circulate
much in academic networks, avoiding conferences, scrupulously
performing his teaching duties, and conversing only with a small
group of close friends. His years in Britain mark a lean phase in his
academic output, consisting only of a few incisive book reviews (in-
cluded in this volume).

In 1 970- 1 Guha came to India to do research for a book on Gandhi.
Accompanied by his second wife Mechthild (an Austrian student
of Anthropology whom he had met in Sussex), and based at the Delhi
School of Economics, he came into contact with Maoist students at
the university. This encounter with the postcolonial present transformed
his intellectual project. He decided to abandon the Gandhi book and
instead research and reflect upon peasant insurgency and the formations
of power in Indian society. The seeds were sown of Subaltern Studies .

But the demands of the present remained insistent. Through the
1970s Guha wrote a series of essays (reproduced in this volume),
mostly for the Calcutta radical magazine Frontier edited by his friend
the poet-journalist Samar Sen, analysing the Indian state and its te-
nuous commitment to the democratic promises of the republic. Indira
Gandhi s declaration of a state of emergency seemed only to confirm
what Guha had long suspected — that the Indian bourgeoisie had
failed to achieve hegemony, that its rule did not elicit the consent of
large masses of the people, and that its dominance was therefore neces-
sarily based on coercion. What was so long masked had now come out
in the open. Guha’s essay ‘On Torture and Culture’ highlighted the
brutal use of force in police interrogations of political activists and
on prisoners held in detention. It was not easy to come by reports of
torture in police custody or prisons and^Guhas correspondence with
Samar Sen in this period shows how eagerly he sought out such

1 2 The Small Voice of History

information in order to further strengthen his trenchant articles
in Frontier}7

The new research question on the history of relations of domi-
nance and subordination in colonial India also began to be formulated.
The initial statement was made in 1974 in the form of an analysis of
the Bengali play Neel Darpan, celebrated in nationalist history as a
scathing indictment of the oppression of Indian peasants by English
indigo planters. Guhas analysis brought out the complicity of the
Indian liberal intelligentsia of the nineteenth century in the colonial
project of asserting dominance over the peasantry. The full-blown
statement of Guhas research into peasant revolts in the late eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries appeared in 1983 in his book Elementary
Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India}*

By then the first volume of Subaltern Studies had appeared. Guhas
editorial statement, often referred to as the manifesto’ of the project,
announced that the modern historiography of South Asia was domi-
nated by two elitisms — the colonialist and the nationalist — and that
the new series would aim at a critique of both. The idea of such a series
had emerged out of many weekend meetings in Guhas house in
Brighton where he would assemble a group of young historians to talk
about the state ofSouth Asian history. Of them, David Arnold had just
finished a doctorate and started teaching, while Shahid Amin, Gyanen-
dra Pandey, and David Hardiman were still doing their doctoral re-
search. None of them was Guhas student. In 1980 Guha came to
India on his way to Australia and the group was expanded to include
Gautam Bhadra, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Partha Chatterjee. It was an
improbable collection of scholars for launching an ambitious project —
a marginal figure in the academy on the verge of retirement from
university teaching alongside a bunch of greenhorns twenty-five years
younger and virtually unknown as historians.

The early volumes of Subaltern Studies were mosdy concerned with
studies of peasant agitations, especially those in the period of the
nationalist movement. The key idea, following Guhas work, was
the autonomy of peasant consciousness Several essays in Subaltern

17 Letters from Samar Sen to Ranajit Guha, Anustup , 27, 1, 1992, supple-
ment 2.

18 Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Editors Introduction

Studies attempted to show that, contrary to the claims of the existing
historiography, peasant participation in the Congress movements
was prompted neither by patron-client ties nor by the power of
nationalist ideology. Rather, peasants participated for their own
reasons, and often refused to participate. In other words, the nationalist
politics of the peasantry was not the same as that of the elite.

Guha himself contributed to this critique of elitist historiogra-
phy. His longer essays on this theme have been collected in a volume
called Dominance without Hegemony. 19 But he wrote several shorter
essays too (included in the present volume) in which, paying equal
attention to both sides of the colonial divide, he brings out with
striking richness and nuance the predicament of the official colonial
mind as well as the contrary pulls and pressures on the nationalist
intellectual. He also published a couple of essays which, reconstructing
from the most fragmentary pieces of evidence the life and death of a
peasant woman in nineteenth-century Bengal (‘Chandra’s Death’) and
the religious world of the oppressed castes (‘The Career of an Anti-
God in Heaven and on Earth’), will for long remain stellar examples
of the craft of historical anthropology.

From 1 980 to 1 988 Guha was Senior Research Fellow at the Austra-
lian National University (ANU) in Canberra from where he co-ordi-
nated the work of Subaltern Studies. He was an indefatigable editor,
keeping up a steady correspondence in long hand with each member
of the editorial group (expanded in 1983 to include Sumit Sarkar),
always looking for new contributors and meticulously correcting and
improving every manuscript, often submitting them to several revisions.
He retired from ANU in 1988 and, in the foil owing year, relinquished
his editorship of Subaltern Studies . As editor he oversaw the publication
of six volumes in the series between 1982 and 1989 — virtually a
volume every year.

Critique of History

An abiding aspect of Bengali intellectual life, certainly up to Ranajit
Guha’s generation, if not even later, was the intense attraction felt by
urban intellectuals for things rural. One reason for this was the steady

1 Q Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1 997).

The Small Voice of History

migration from rural to urban areas of young people seeking education
and urban employment: Guha is a typical example. This stream
became a veritable flood following the partition of Bengal in 1 947. But
curiously, even for those born and brought up in the city, rural life
often acted as an emotional magnet, directing and shaping their
creative impulses. Rabindranath Tagore remains the most famous
example of the city-bred modern intellectual turning his back on the
city in which he had grown up. Needless to say, there was a great deal
of romanticism that went into the making of this passion. In some
cases (not Tagores), it was nostalgia for a lost arcadia. But for the colo-
nized intellectual there was also a sense that the modern city was a space
that was necessarily and forever colonized — there was nothing left to
be created there. The creative space that was genuinely ones own was
the Indian village of the future. From political activism to literary
representation to art, Bengali intellectuals from the late nineteenth
century found in rural life an inexhaustible source of creative delight.

Not only was Barisal no exception to this rule, it was possibly its
chief exemplar. The poetry of Jibanananda Das, one of Guhas favou-
rite poets, has immortalized the Barisal landscape in Bengali literature.
In more recent times, it has given rise to some remarkable reminiscence
literature.20 Ranajit Guha has always resisted the urge to reminisce in
public about his life. But in a fragment of a memoir, composed at a
particularly dark moment in his life in Britain, he seems to recall a time
when life was lived close to the soil and speech was not constrained
by the shackles of reason.

I was whittling a piece of bamboo for the kitchen garden. Aunt Bidhu
wants the courgettes to hang high well above the ground. The fruits
grow smaller if they are allowed to smell the earth. Noga came and
started playing with the chips of bamboo bark thrown about. . . .
Children are so restless and stupid. But I like to talk to him. I think I
like to talk to him more than to anybody else in the family. For one
thing, I can talk about any damned thought that comes to my mind.

20 In particular, Tapan Raychaudhuri, Romanthan athaba bhimratiprapta
paracharitcharcha (Kolkata: Ananda, 1993); Mihir Sengupta, Bishadbriksha
(Kolkata: Subarnarekha, 2005); Tapan Raychaudhuri, Bangalnama (Kolkata:
Ananda, 2007).

Editors Introduction

I don’t have to talk clearly, for he has no need to understand what I say.
I cannot say things clearly anyway. So, grown-ups in the family think
I am so stupid. I am indeed very stupid. I can’t make words and mean-
ings come together. Speaking things that must mean anything must be
spoken well. To speak well takes away from my concentration. At the
moment I must concentrate.

The conversation strays from one topic to another, without rhyme
or reason, until, perhaps because this was Barisal, it comes to the
subject of water.

I said, ‘Did you know that we cut the embankment last night to let
the canal water come into the old tank?’ ‘Ah yes?’ he said, his big eyes
sparkling at once with eagerness. ‘I went there at dawn today,’ I said,
‘and guess what I saw.’ ‘What?’ asked Noga, moving closer to me as he
still remained squatting and playing with the bamboo bits, but not so
eagerly as before. I took my time to clean a difficult joint in the pole
and added, ‘Well, I went once at dawn to see if the high tide is com-
ing in smoothly from the canal into the tank. There were lots of fish
caught up in the current and swimming it. Carps mostly — big, small
and shoals of little ones following their mothers. But then, suddenly,
you know what I saw? A huge chital slowly making its way into the
tank. It was so big that I could sec its flat silver side brushing against
the wall of the embankment. It was so big you can’t imagine.’ . . . The
pole was nearly ready now. It was smooth at the bottom end that was
to be pegged into the earth, but had small knotty angles higher up to
hold horizontal bars of wood that would act as support for the cour-
gette bush. ‘Want to have a look at the water coming in?’ I said, getting
up with the pole and the knife. Noga picked up a rejected twig, beat
the ground twice with it, and after a short leap in the air to express his
appreciation of my offer, followed.21

The years after his retirement from ANU saw Guha gaining the
attention of the global academy. He travelled frequently to give
lectures and attend conferences at universities in the United States and
Europe, his works were reprinted in new editions from university
presses in the United States, his essays were published in journals such

21 Unpublished fragment of memoir (courtesy: Mechthild Guha).

1 6 The Small Voice of History

as Critical Inquiry and Social Text , and he made many new academic
friendships. His thinking too moved in new directions.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the socialist regimes in East-
ern Europe could only have been welcomed by Guha who had been
an open critic of the Soviet bureaucratic system since the late 1950s.
After he moved with Mechthild to Purkersdorf, a suburb of Vienna,
in 1 999, he occasionally met comrades from his days in the Communist
Party who had later risen high in the state bureaucracies of various
East European countries. For Guha, the meetings were not comfortable,
because fond memories of youthful comradeship could not hide the
knowledge of willing participation in an oppressive regime. But Guha
could not rest content by dismissing the Soviet experiment in historical
engineering, and his own involvement in the Communist Party, as
mere aberrations. Rather, it prompted in him a deeper questioning of
an entire mode of modern knowledge that placed enormous value on
technological mastery over nature and the organization of social
practices according to the criteria of economic rationality. He was
increasingly drawn to the phenomenological writings of Martin
Heidegger, especially the later works. At the same time, he began
to think anew the uses of language, delving into the rich storehouse
of Sanskrit poetics and the linguistic philosophy of Bhartrihari.
Guhas writings from this period show the emergence of a new critique
of the very forms of modern history w riting.

The most elaborate statement of this argument was made in a series
of lectures delivered at Columbia University in 2000, published under
the title History at the Limit ofWorld-History}2 Against history, whose
practices are necessarily entwined with the rationality of the state and
always implicated in the practices of domination, Guha, invoking
Heidegger, proposed the concept of historicality that could recall the
past in the phenomenology of everyday life. In his most recent essays
(included in this volume), he often makes the suggestion that the
methods of the historian are inadequate for this purpose and that one
should turn to the poet and the fiction writer to learn how to represent
in language the lived presence of historicality in everyday practice.

22 Ranajit Guha, History at the Limit ofWorld-History (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2002).

Editors Introduction

Instead of the archives and political discourse, there is now a surge
of literary material with which Guha chooses to build or illustrate
his arguments — Orwell, Conrad, Dickens, Chekov, Tagore, Bengal’s
perennial favourite Hutomy and, of course, the Mahabharatay that
infinite source of stories for every dilemma in human life.

There is also an insistent play on the themes of homelessness and
exile. Belonging is an essential aspect of historicality. Yet, in his later
essays, Guha seems to look back on a life lived in history but always
away from home. This, he appears to suggest, is a favourable, perhaps
even a necessary, condition for the work of writing history. But
attention to historicality would drag one back to the memory of
belonging among plants and twigs and water and fish and a younger
companion who did not insist on coherent speech. Perhaps it is only
fitting that Ranajit Guhas only doctoral degree should have come
to him at the age of eighty-five when the University of Dhaka gave
him a Doctor of Literature honoris causa. It is a recognition that has
come from very close to home.

PART I

Rules of Property

An Administrative Blueprint
of 1785

Of the many discussions, held at different administrative levels
on the eve of the Permanent Settlement, the Grant-Shore and
Shore-Cornwallis controversies are well known. Historical
research, however, has yet to acknowledge the fact that in the decade
that separated the Act of 1784 from that of 1793, many other fruitful
debates had taken place in the Council and in the Board of Revenue
among highly placed government officials on the very same problems
of revenue settlement and administration. Very much material
concerning these still lies lost in dusty oblivion in the Proceedings of
the Revenue Department of the Governor-General in Council and
the Board of Revenue, and one wonders why even William Hunter,
who is one person supposed to have been familiar with these archives,
does not as much as honour these discussions with a mention. For, to
anyone who has even idly rambled through these proceedings, it is
dear how these controversies recorded in lengthy communications
and minutes, written sometimes in the impassioned style of a Macken-
zie but more often in the sober tone of a Law or a Chapman, form-
ed the very stuff out of which the vague and rather wishful Act of
1784 gathered substance enough to assume a concrete administrative

Copyright © 1955 Ranajit Guha. First published in Bengal Past and Present,
74, 1, 138 (J^nuary-June 1955), pp. 68-78. [The citations in this essays foot-
notes fellow the abbreviated form given in the available copy of the manus-
cript. Full archival and publication details, though unavailable here, can with
a little deduction and research be found out by those wishing to pursue the
sources. — Ed.]

22 The Small Voice of History

shape in the Decennial Settlement and an elaborate legal shape in the
Act of 1793.

One of the earliest of these debates is recorded in the Proceed-
ings of the Revenue Department of the Governor-General in Council,
dated the 10th May and the 18th May, 1785, during Macphersons
regime. The historical importance of this debate lies, first in the fact
that it records some of the earliest reactions to the Act of 1784 among
the Company’s seniormost servants in India. Secondly, it reveals in
an unmistakable fashion and in John Macphersons own words the
hesitancy and the indecision characteristic of that gentleman’s short
term of administration. Thirdly, it was in course of this debate that
the Governor-General produced almost literally from his pocket John
Shores Memorial of 1782, which was as much a continuation of the
ideas of Philip Francis as an anticipation of the Act of 1784.

Pitts India Act of 1784

Pitt’s India Bill, made into law in 1784, brought the private interests
of the East India Company directly in line with the interests of the em-
pire. Therefore, the Directors of the Company felt that they must put
their house in order.’1 For the cracks in Warren Hastings’ system had
become too wide and obvious to be lightly papered over. Everywhere
the old zemindary system was breaking down. Many of the ancient
zemindar families were on the road to destitution, their estates having
been auctioned out in whole or in part to larmers. Many others suc-
ceeded in retaining their properties only by placing themselves at the
mercy of usurers. Meanwhile, complaints of rackrenting and oppression
by farmers started pouring in to the Council from the district officers,
zemindars, and ryots. And the only too recent disturbances of Rangpur
were a sharp pointer that even the unshakeable fortitude of the peas-
antry might be overstrained.

So far as the internal administration of the Company’s territories
was concerned, the Act of 1784 was an open acknowledgement that
the Hastings plan had outlived itself and that a radical change was
required. But how exactly this change was going to be effected was
nowhere in this Act stated except in very vague terms, which fell short

1 Romesh Dutt, Economic History of British India , p. 81.

An Administrative Blueprint of 1785

even of the provisions of Fox s abortive East India Bill. On the question
of zemindaries, for instance, the Act of 1 784 contents itself by merely
showing an undefined bias in favour of a permanent settlement, but
maintains a convenient silence about the knotty question of hereditary
rights and unalterability of taxes. It was, as Mill correctly observes,
even less than a palliative. The Directors, however, seem to have had
little or no concern about the inadequacies of the law. They had almost
a superstitious faith in Cornwallis’s ability to make up for what had
been left out of legislation. Meanwhile, however, between the depar-
ture of Warren Hastings and the arrival of Cornwallis, the day-to-day
administration had to be carried on, the settlement for 1785-6 made,
and the business of Collectors and investment continued by mediocri-
ties who knew no magic.

The debate of 1785 shows how in this vacuum of twenty months
that elapsed between the enactment (August 13, 1784) and its
first elaborate interpretation by the Directors in their letter of the
1 2th April, 1 786, two of the most responsible officials of the Company
both drew upon the language and spirit of the Act seeking to wring
out of it the promised solution of their problems; and how, since the
solution was just not there, each of them argued so differently from
the other that they reached almost as opposite conclusions as Francis
and Hastings had done years ago.

Charles Stuart s Plan2

In the preamble to his ‘Plan for Collecting the Revenues’, dated April
1785, Charles Stuart, member of the Supreme Council, states that in
drawing up the Plan, ‘I have attended to the spirit of the 39th Article
of the late Act of Parliament in favour of the rights of Zemindars.’ The
Plan opens with an attack on the existing system. But the criticism
is limited to the principles of administration alone without even as
much as raising the question of zemindary rights and the propriety of
the firming system. This was possibly because the probe into the com-
plex problems of proprietorship had not yet begun. Bypassing these

2 Extracts quoted from Stuart s Plan are all taken out of the Proceedings of
the Revenue Department, Governor-General in Council, dated the 10th May,
1785.

24 The Small Voice of History

momentous issues, which were to excite as much controversy at a later
date, the author directed his objections to the over-centralized system
of revenue administration which since 1781 had reduced the Collectors
to mere figureheads by virtually entrusting the task of revenue collection
to the Centre. This, said Stuart, helped nobody, the elimination of
the intermediate agency of the Collectors meant no economy for the
zemindars. Forced by the distance between districts and Calcutta, they
had to engage the expensive services of Vakeels who were often quite
unreliable. Nor was this system of any advantage to the government.
In a statement of net receipts into the Treasury for the last twelve years
from 1772-3 to 1783-4, Stuart showed that the average for the
last three years fell far short of that for the years when the Collectors
were in charge of collections. Thus, according to this statement the
average of net receipts for the three years from 1781-2 to 1783-4 was
Rs 2,12,28,339 which was Rs 18,23,638 less than the average for
the period from 1772-3 to 1773-4. 3 From this he concluded that
‘Government benefited more by the former system of employing Col-
lectors than they do by the present one.’

Revenue Administration

The positive recommendations of the Plan begin with a new set of rules
for the settlement of the Company’s territories. In the first place, Stuart
proposed that the settlement should be made with every Zemindar
who is not totally incapable’, and, in case of a zemindar being a minoi

3 In a note to his Plan, Stuart admits that ‘rhis account is not perfectly
exact ... If, however, there is any difference in the sums . . . such difference
extends to all the years here stated and will be found to make no alteration in
the principle which I set out with, viz. that the net receipts into the treasury were
greatly more formerly than they are at present.’ In fact, he found it necessary
later on to correct these figures as is clear from a statement in his Minutes print-
ed as evidence of Hastings’ trial, according to which the average of the three
later years would be Rs 1,92,32,472 as against Rs 2,12,70,739 for the two
earlier years. This does not, howevei, change his contention which is confirmed
also by Mills estimate that in the year ending on 1st May, 1772, the net terri-
torial revenues of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa amounted to £2, 1 26,766 declining
to £2,072,963 in the year ending on the same day in 1785. — Mill & Wilson,
History of British India , vol. IV, pp. 358-60.

An Administrative Blueprint of 1785

or a female or otherwise considered incapable, with a near relative or
an old servant of the zemindary. Significantly enough, he did not ask:
‘Who owns the land?* His unequivocal advocacy of a zemindary settle-
ment and utter silence about traditional and legal rights in land may
be interpreted to mean that by 1785 there were already a number of
high officials in Bengal to whom the need for a zemindary settlement
was beyond question. After the hopeless experience of the farming sys-
tem they were convinced, empirically, of the benefit of a change-over
to what seemed at that time the only other alternative. And they were
eager to give it an immediate trial without considering it in the least
necessary to consult the Hindu and Islamic law-books or the opinions
of Roy Royans and Canongoes. Many such uncritical protagonists of
the zemindary settlement must have been trusted later on by Cornwallis
to collect for him the local data on which alone depended the ultimate
decision as to the desirability or otherw ise of this system. No wonder,
therefore, that conducted by officials biased a priori in favour of a set-
tlement with zemindars, the seven years’ rural investigation that pre-
ceded the Permanent Settlement produced next to nothing.

Secondly, Stuart recommended that the rate of assessment for
the new Settlement should be the average of collections for the three
years from 1 773-4 to 1 775-6. ‘From the best information I have been
able to obtain this was considered very equitable jumma.’ He was,
however, ready to allow a certain amount of flexibility in the rate of
assessment and added a note to say that the officers ‘need not be, abso-
lutely confined to the rate of assessment mentioned in the first part of
the Plan.’ Only, the three years’ average was ‘to be taken for the basis
of all their settlements.’

Thirdly, the settlement with the zemindars should be permanent.
It was to remain experimental for the first year only ‘until we receive
the orders of the Court of Directors upon the 39th Clause of the late
Act of Parliament. But after that it will be proper to fix the Jumma
unalterably during the lifetime of the zemindar.’

Fourthly, Stuart proposed to enforce the payment of revenue in
regular instalments ( kists ) on pain of public sale of a part of the de-
faulting zemindars’ lands.

Would a Settlement, based on the above principles, mean an overall
loss in revenue to the Company? Stuart sought to disarm doubters by
stating diat although the proposed Jumma, amounting to Rs 2,67,82,458,

26 The Small Voice of History

might appear less than the current Jumma of Rs 2,75,59,000, never-
theless the net collections for the present year would by no means ex-
ceed Rs 2,45,59,000, thus giving his recommendation a clear advantage
of Rs 22,23, 458.4

Hardly more convincing than this wishful statistical muddle is
Stuart s prophecy of a golden age resulting from his settlement: ‘At
present the Zemindar collects the utmosr his country can produce, and
consequently rackrents his tenants. Could he be assured that Govern-
ment would not raise their demands upon him, it would be his interest
to encourage improvements. He would grow rich himself. The peo-
ple under him would be happy . . .’ There, the classic illusion of the
Permanent Settlement! As is well known from later history, nothing
of the sort happened. The zemindar grew rich all right, but the peo-
ple under him suffered a corresponding degree of pauperization. For
neither Mr Stuarts Plan nor its perfected prototype of 1793 provid-
ed any effective safeguard for the peasantry against rackrenting by
zemindars.

The Superintendents

The most striking reforms proposed by the Plan are those concerning
the organization of revenue administration. By 1785 the Collectors
stood shorn of all effective powers. The policy of revenue settlement
was controlled by the Council, and its execution by the Committee of
Revenue. The zemindars were encouraged to pay their revenue directly
into the Khalsa at Calcutta, for the Collectors were not trusted. And

4 The figures quoted in this paragraph are a testimony to Stuarts excellent
optimism — but nothing more than that. He calculates the proposed Jumma
on the average of three years’ gross collections from 1773— 4 to 1775-6 and
compares it with the net collections expected in the current year. If the pro-
posed Jumma is calculated on the average of net collections for those three
years, as stated in Stuart’s own account in the Minutes, it would amount to
Rs 2,3 1 , 1 0,495 which is Rs 14,48,505 less than the expected net collections for
the current year. If the average is calculated on the basis of Stuarts revised
estimates of net collections for those three years as presented in his ‘Minute of
Printed Evidence of Hastings Trial’ (Appendix, art, VI, no. 157, p. 904), the
deficiency increases still further.

A n Administrative Blueprint of 1 785 27

not infrequently did the Committee send out specially empower-
ed commissioners to the districts to conduct business over the heads
of the Collectors. The result was that the governments ignorance of
agrarian conditions increased in direct proportion to its distrust of its
local officers. And, as Ascoli puts it: A combination of ignorance and
disrrust has never proved an administrative success.’5

Stuart, like Shore, had clearly grasped the truth that the key link
in the chain of the Company’s administration was the Collectorship.
His Plan for the restoration of zemindaries was, therefore, based in its
organizational aspect on a strong plea for the restoration of the Col-
lectorships to their former importance. But not in the old way. By the
former system the Collector’s authority had been built up at the cost
of the rights and status of the zemindar. The consequent lack of co-
operation resulted in many impediments to the collection of revenues.
‘This was an evil productive of many inconveniences and will be recti-
fied by the Plan which I wish to propose.’

The three principal recommendations of the Plan concerning
the collecting agency were: (a) appointment of European officers as
Superintendents; (b) relative independence of the Superintendents in
their function; (c) grant of adequate salaries for them.

The Superintendents would be required to combine collection of
revenue with magisterial and judicial duties. But Stuart s emphasis was
as much on an increase of their authority as on their being Europeans.
The native amils employed for some time under Warren Hastings had
proved to be a complete administrative failure. They had imported
into the Company’s service all the vices of corruption, graft, and ineffi-
ciency characteristic of a moribund feudal bureaucracy, and unfortu-
nately they had found nothing exemplary in the Company’s service
itself to learn from. But the time for turning the lights inwards had not
yet come, for the powerful exposure of deficiencies in the civil service
began only with the opening of Hastings’ trial. So, to start with, the
alien native element had to be purged, because ‘in times of exigency
Government will be able to depend much more on every kind of execu-
tion upon European Superintendents than they possibly could do
upon the Natives, who, it is not to be supposed, can be influenced by

5 Ascoli, Early Revenue History of Bengal p. 37.

The Small Voice of History

these ties which must ever bind the servants of the Company and sub-
jects of Great Britain, to exert themselves with ardour in promoting
the general welfare of the British nation.’ The Plan suggested that the
total number of district officers should be raised to thirty — fifteen
Senior Merchants, ten Junior Merchants, and five Factors — all serving
as Superintendents in graded ranks.

Nowhere in his Minute did Stuart speak openly of the evils resulting
from the Councils lack of confidence in the independent exercise of
authority by the Collectors. On this point, indeed, his proposed re-
forms fell short of the radical measures of the Cornwallis administration
later on. Nevertheless, he made his inclination quite clear when he
penned the relationship between the Council and the Superintendents
under the proposed arrangement. Eager to relieve the Council of ‘all
the trouble and difficulties which would necessarily arise from their
entering into the detail of the business of the Superintendents’ — a very
mild description of what was in fact vexatious interference — Stuart
recommended that the duty of maintaining a routine check over the
work of the Superintendents should be delegated in monthly rotation
to one of the members of the Council. He was to take his seat in the
Khalsa, during his monthly term, as ‘Comptroller of the Collections’.
He ‘would never want for the best information with respect to the
interior state of the Districts’ and ‘it would be impossible for the
Superintendents to deceive him even if they were so inclined.’ The in-
dependent exercise of authority by the Superin tendents was emphasized
further by the recommendations mentioned above, that the proposed
rate of assessment would not be binding on them, but was to serve as
only a standard’ of expectation’ and that a latitude was given to the
Superintendent to make the Jumma more or less according to local cir-
cumstances.’ Thus was to be restored that very important operat-
ive authority which was taken away from the district officers twelve
years ago.

Finally, the question of salaries. Stuart touches upon the very heart
of the problem of the Company’s civil service when he says: ‘The
allowances hitherto drawn by the Gentlemen employed in the collec-
tion and management of the revenue (excepting those at the head of
the Department) have never amounted to more than a bare subsistence
and in most places have not been equal to the unavoidable expences of

An Administrative Blueprint of 1785

the situation , thus forcing the Company’s servants to take to private
business and other avocations’. How true this observation was can be
understood from the following letter addressed to the Council by
the Chiefs and Collectors on the 21st April, 1785, and read out to the
Council in the same meeting where Stuart presented his Minute: ‘We
humbly beg leave to represent that our salaries are not sufficient to
support the respect due to our stations as delegates of Government in
distant provinces, but have too much deference for the Hon’ble Board
to point out the proper additions and rely on their justice to determine
them.’6 Among the fifteen signatories were some of the ablest senior
district officers of the Company, such as T. Law, M. Day, C. Chap-
man,!". Redfearn, W.A. Brooke, and E. Fenwick. The Plan, therefore,
recommended ‘handsome salaries’ for the Superintendents — Rs 1 ,200,
Rs 1 ,000, and Rs 800 respectively for the three grades in descending
order — so that they should be ‘placed above every temptation that
might lead to an infringement or a neglect of their duty.’

Judicial Administration

It has been noted above that Stuai t’s recommendation was to unite the
management of revenues and administration of justice in the same
hands. Referring to ‘the clashing of the authority of the judges and of
the officers of the revenue’ under ihe system in force, he said that the
authorities had decided upon a solution that amounted to a virtual sus-
pension of justice for the greater part of the year.

The evil existed in the disunion of the two authorities, and without
again uniting them in the same person it became evident that one must
be made a sacrifice of to the other . . . it was in consequence determin-
ed that during the months of heavy collections, the administration of
justice should be suspended altogether, which was accordingly done.
The judges, therefore, do not at present sit above seven months in the
year, a period by no means sufficient to enable them to keep up their
business.

A typical result of the inevitable delay in justice is recorded in a let-
ter (12th April, 1875) addressed to the Government by C. Keating,

6 Proc. Dept., G-G in C. (10th May, 1785).

The Small Voice of History

Magistrate of Backergunge.7 He informs the Council that a large
number of criminals are delivered monthly to the Fowjdary Adawlut.
But delay in justice causes many deaths among the prisoners, who are
kept confined in an unhealthy straw-thatched place awaiting trial.
Since most of the cases relate to petty charges, such as using abusive
language, petty assaults, etc., and require very light punishment, the
magistrate prays for additional powers to deal with such cases. And the
Council decides to grant the prayer.

Thus, the anomaly arising out of an unnatural division of authority
was sought to be remedied by a suspension of justice and the mal-
adjustment resulting from the suspending of justice corrected by grants
of additional powers to local officers. Stuarts recommendation breaks
through this vicious circle by making the Superintendents responsible
both for collection of revenues and the administration of justice.

From the resume given above it should be clear that Charles Stuart s
Plan of 1785 deserves historical recognition as one of the earliest
blueprints of that administration which is credited to Cornwallis.
Treated with a little more sympathy and decision on the part of John
Macpherson, the Plan would not have been cold-storaged and ultimately
forgotten: Had the Council decided in that transitional year of 1785
to give Stuarts recommendations an honest trial, Cornwallis on his
arrival sixteen months later might have found something ready-made
to work upon and the three wasteful years that passed between the
Directors letter of the 1 2 th April, 1786 and the commencement of the
Decennial Settlement could have been saved for better use. For on all
essentials Stuarts Plan of April 1785 was as good a starting-point as
those directives.

John Shore s Unpublished Memorial
of 1782

On the 18th May, 1782, John Macpherson, the Governor-General,
submitted to the Council his Minute in reply to Stuarts. Enclosed
with this Minute was a Memorial, dated the 1 3th January, 1 782, sign-
ed by John Shore.

7 Proc. Dept. G-G in C. (15th April, 1785).

An Administrative Blueprint of 1785

The greater part of this Memorial is still unpublished, although its
value as a document of great historical interest both for the history of
the British administration in Bengal and for an understanding of the
writer s personality is beyond question. Neither Firminger nor Hunter
seems to have been acquainted with it. Among later scholars F.D.
Ascoli is the only one who has left a record of his knowledge of this
Memorial by quoting three lines from it without, however, a reference
to his source.8 Remembering that in 1 78 1 Shore was deputed as a spe-
cial officer of the Committee of Revenue to make the settlement of
Dacca, it is almost certain that the Memorial had been written out at
Dacca in course of that year. It is likely, therefore, that a copy of it —
maybe the original draft itself — was discovered by Ascoli during his
investigation of the Dacca revenue papers. Our source, however, is the
copy preserved in the Records Office of the West Bengal Government.

Shore's biographer quotes three extracts from the Memorial, but
rhe title and the date he gives to this document are both wrong.9
The title given in the Proceedings is ‘Remarks on the Mode of Admi-
nistering Justice to the Natives in Bengal and on the Collection of
the Revenues’, and not, as the biographer calls it, ‘Memoir on the
Administration of Justice and Collection of Revenues’. The bio-
grapher’s date, 1785, is also three years in advance of the correct date,
the 13th January, 1782. 10

Concerning the origin of this document Macpherson says that it
was one of the statements which were obtained by him for his perso-
nal use from some of the most experienced servants of the Company
‘containing their impartial sentiments . . . and suggesting to me the
best plans for realizing a full and permanent payment of revenue from
these provinces.’ The Memorial received from Shore, he says, ‘was not
meant for the public eye, but to give me a clear view of the subject/ The
younger Teignmouth, however, gives a slightly different version which,
if true, should be regarded as throwing new light both on the develop-
ment of Shores own ideas and his relations with Macpherson:

8 Ascoli, op. cit., p. 36.

9 Teignmouth, Lifi of Lord Teignmouth , vol. 1, pp. 73-4, 485-8.

10 Extracts from Shores Memorial and Macpherson s Minute are all taken
out of the Proceedings of Rev. Dept., G-G in C, of the 18th May, 1785.

The Small Voice of History

The reflections communicated by Mr. Shore to Mr. Macpherson
were coupled with the request that he would impart the substance of
them to Mr. Hastings in the mildest terms. Mr. Macpherson whether
through forgetfulness, or more culpable remissness, inserted them,
as a Minute, on the Records of the Supreme Council; a breach of confi-
dence which — as Mr. Macpherson, being Senior Member of the
Council was destined to succeed Mi. Hastings in the Government —
left: Mr. Shore, in his own opinion, no alternative, but to resign his post
on the occurrence of that event. 1 1

From the trenchant criticism of the existing administration contained
in the Memorial and from Macphersons own words that this was not
meant for the public eye’, it is easy to understand why John Shore,
still a junior official, should have felt shy of Warren Hastings getting
a scent of his ‘impartial sentiments’. It is clear also that his hostility to
Macpherson dates from this incident. That their relations were not at
all unfriendly till the summer of 1 785 is proved, first, by the fact that
he had confidence enough in Macpherson to consider such a compro-
mising document safe in his hands at a time when he himself was
still not at the height of his career, and secondly, by the lavish eulogy
with which Macpherson introduces Shore’s notes to the Council.12
But the unreserved contempt with which Shore writes of Macpherson
in a years time shows that the ‘breach of confidence had turned — at
least on Shores part — the former friendliness to bitter hostility.’13

An incidental interest of Shore's Memorial lies in an elaborate esti-
mate of the character of the natives of Bengal with which he actually
opens the statement. ‘Individuals’, he says, ‘have little sense of honour
and the nation is wholly void of public virtue; they make not the least
scruple of lying where falsehood is attended with advantage . .

11 Teignmouth, op. cit., pp. 98-9.

12 The universal testimony, says Macpherson in his Minute, ‘which the
voice of the natives, the repeated approbation of this Government and the supe-
rior esteem of his fellow servants bore to the merits of Mr. Shore, renders it
unnecessary for me to add to this praise, to which he was entitled for his know-
ledge and integrity in the administration of tb<* revenue.’

1 3 Teignmouth, op. cir. , pp. 1 28-9. Shore s Letter to W. Benaley ( 1 3th Novem-
ber, 1786).

An Administrative Blueprint of 1 7 85

Again, ‘With a Hindoo all is centred in himself, his own interest is his
guide; ambition is a secondary quality with him, and the love of money
is the source of this passion . . .’ These damning generalizations of an
entire people, based evidently on experience of personal contact with
those miserable specimens of humanity who alone among our country-
men had, at that epoch, offered their services to the conquerors as ban-
yans, gomastahs, salt and opium contractors, and so on, were, however,
accompanied by a streak of inescapable self-criticism, as Shore observed:
‘Those parts of our character which first drew their attention were
bravery, clemency and good faith. They have since found that we are
not wholly destitute of weaknesses and vices, and that Europeans, like
all others, are open to temptations; the respect they entertained for us
as individuals or as a nation, is diminished, and they now consider
themselves upon a more equal footing.’ This verdict on native character
leads logically to the suggestion that the Company’s Government in
this country ‘should, I think, be despotic’, and between the govern-
ing authority and the subjects ‘I would preserve a great and respectable
distance.’

Behind this almost constitutional distrust of the Bengalees and the
advocacy of a strong and despotic government there was a pronounced
political motive ‘to provide against all contingencies’. It is wise, he says,
not to rely on the peaceable disposition of the natives or on a supposed
attachment to us, but establish such a control in all parts of the coun-
try that in case of a foreign invasion by an European power, or of the
inroads of an eastern enemy, or the event of rebellion in any part of our
provinces, the payment of revenues may not be suspended, illicit
correspondence or dangerous confederacies inay be checked, and the
contagion of rebellion stifled.* Clearly the halcyon days of imperial
expansion had not yet come. The year 1781 was a particularly diffi-
cult year. The war with the Marathas had not yet been concluded and
Hyder Ali’s war had just begun. The war in America was an added
reason for being on guard against the other European powers in India,
the French above all. Meanwhile, in Bengal itself bands of armed
peasantry had joined the Chuars ‘and the Sannyasis, reducing British
rule to nothing in certain parts of the western and northern districts.’
Shore was right, therefore, when he advised that this was no time to
relax, to trust, to be friendly with the natives. One of the principal

34 The Small Voice of History

theoreticians of the Permanent Settlement, he realized early enough
that the social base of the British rule in Bengal, twenty-five years after
Plassey, was still precariously narrow.

His recommendations for reform are based on three main principles:
(a) thorough Europeanization of the Company’s service in both the
departments of justice and revenue; (b) unification of judicial and
revenue administration in the same hands; and (c) appointment of
district officers as Superintendents to carry out this twin responsibility.

These proposals bear a family resemblance to those of Stuart. In
advocating these principles they both argued on the same lines. Was
the Plan of 1783 inspired by the Memorial of 1782? There is no evid-
ence to prove that it was, for Shore s document must have been still a
matter of closed confidence between Macpherson and himself when
Stuart submitted his Minute to the Council on the 1 Oth May, 1785.
To discount thus the probability of leakage is to add enormously to
the stature of Charles Stuart, for in that case he would be proved to
share with Shore himself the credit of having foreseen, long before the
Permanent Settlement, the shape of things to come.

Macphersons Reply

The Governor-General Mr Macphersons reply to the far-sighted
scheme of his colleague comes almost as an anti-climax, especially after
he had tabled Shores brilliant statement But its historical interest
lies precisely in its mediocrity. Full of hesitation and ambiguities, this
document very clearly reflects the tone of the Macpherson adminis-
tration.

On the question of uniting the responsibilities of justice and
revenue collection in the same hands, the Governor-General differs
with Shore and Stuart when he says with characteristic indecision: ‘I
very much doubt whether we are as yet sufficiently advanced to risk
the consequences of vesting so unchecked a power generally in the
hands of our servants . . . Here I am sorry to be obliged to differ with
Mr Stuart in a leading principle of his system . .

He is also not sure that Stuarts account of declining receipts is
correct. He quotes figures to indicate a recent decline in balances
which, says he, ‘is a strong proof of the progressive improvement of the

An Administrative Blueprint of 1785

Committees system and a strong argument against innovation.’ Of
course, the charges of collection have increased by about thirty lakhs
in the last ten years since 1772-3, but 'the increase might more pro-
perly be called the increasing expences of Government than the
increased expences of the collection of the revenue.’14

Fundamentally, Macpherson’s weak-kneed defence of the existing
system had its source in his fear of all change. He was shy of originality
and, as he himself admitted in his Minute, resistance to innovation was
the very motto of his government: ‘When I succeeded in February last
to the charge of my present office, I laid it down as a general and
necessary principle to avoid innovation in the system of government,
to endeavour to conduct the public affairs in the train in which they
had devolved upon me, rectifying at the same time such abuses as could
be remedied without any violence to established arrangements

But the policy of no-change could but ill afford to stand its ground
in an epoch when the old system was falling to pieces and a radical
dismantling had been long overdue, so that, before the powerful logic
of the line advanced by Shore and Stuart, the Governor-General yield-
ed in an amazing confession of weakness. He said that if the majority
of the Council differed with him and found Stuart s Plan good enough
to be put to execution without risk, he would give his entire sup-
port to such a decision despite his own disagreement. As an exam-
ple of vacillation this has no parallel in the record of the omnipotent
Governor-Generalships of the eighteenth century. A Warren Hastings
would have fought a duel and a Cornwallis resigned office with lordly
dignity rather than give up his ground so sneakishly.

14 It is interesting to note that Wilson justifies this strange logic. See Mill &
Wilson, op. cit., p. 360, footnote.

Introduction to the
Burdwan District Records
1788-1800

The wealth of Burdwan; Maratha raids — effects described by contemporary
writers — Maharashtra-puran\ famine of 1770 — Reza Khans report —
Burdwans vulnerability to drought — distress increased by pressure of
revenue demands — views of Warren Hastings — drain of wealth.

For ages before the British conquest of Bengal, Burdwan enjoyed
a traditional reputation for prosperity. Although Abul Fazl
could cite to the credit of Sarkar Sharifabad (of which Burd-
wan constituted a mahal with a revenue of 18,76,142 dams) noth-
ing nobler than its cattle and poultry,1 there are many references to its

Copyright © 1956 Ranajit Guha. First published in Ranajit Guha and A.
Mitra, eds. West Bengal District Records, New Series: Burdwan , Letters Issued
1788-1800 (Calcutta: Superintendent of Census Operations, West Bengal,
1956), pp. Ivii-lxxxiv.The abbreviations used below, COD for General Letter to
the Court of Directors, GGG for Proceedings of the Governor-General in Council
and BOR for Proceeding > of the Board of Revenue , all refer to the MS Records
preserved in the Record Room of the Government of West Bengal. BLR stands
for Bengal District Records: Burdwan Letters Received , ed. A. Mitra. [The phrase
‘in this volume which will be frequently encountered within the ensuing essay
refers to the edited volume mentioned above. The citations in this essays foot-
notes follow the abbreviated form given in the available cop^ of the manus-
cript. Full archival and publication details, though unavailable here, can with
a little deduction and research be found out by those wishing to pursue the
sources. — Ed.]

1 ‘In the Sarkar of Sharifabad is a beautiful species of catde, white in colour,
and of a fine build ... It is noted for the Barbary goat and for fighting cocks/
Ain-i-Akbari , ed. Jarrett, vol. II, p. 125.

Introduction to the Burdwan District Records 37

affluence in early Bengali literature. Jayanandas Chaitanya-mangal ,
written in the late sixteenth century, for instance, describes Katwa as
a beautiful city with its ‘brick wall and lovely minarets, its wells and
rivulets and its well-laid terraces on the banks of the Ganges.’2 And
then there are Ramprosad Sens well-known stanzas on the prosperous
city of Burdwan and its bazaars of Alivardi s time.3

This prosperity was to last only till 1 742 when the Marathas raided
Bengal. For a time during the first invasion the district actually became
the very cockpit of harassing skirmishes between the raiders and the
Bengal army. The marches and counter- marches of Alivardi s troops
and the lightning attacks of Bhaskar Pandits cavalry ( bargis ) reduced
the district to ruins. The colossal loss of lives and resources which the
Maratha raiders brought upon Burdwan and the neighbouring districts
has been recorded in the writings of several Persian and Bengali auth-
ors of the eighteenth century. Ghulam Husain Salim, for instance, des-
cribes how at one stage the Marathas ‘set fire to granaries and spared
no vestige of fertility, and when the stores and granaries of Burdwan
were exhausted, and the supply of imported grains was also completely
cut off, to avert death by starvation, human beings ate plantain-roots,
whilst animals were fed with the leaves of trees. Even these gradually
ceased to be available. For breakfasts and suppers nothing except the
discs of the sun and the moon feasted their eyes.’4 5 Two Bengali writers,
Vaneshwar Vidyalankar, the court pandit of the Rajah of Burdwan,
and Gangaram, the poet of Maharashtra-puran . 0 have both left eyewit-
ness accounts of mass exodus of panic stricken people, of the burning
down of deserted hamlets all along the Bhagirathi, the senseless
massacre of women and children among parties of villagers ambushed
on their way of escape by Maratha horsemen, the plunder of gold and
silver, and the cynical torture perpetrated by the bargis on those who
had no means with which to satisfy their savage demand, ‘Give us
rupees, give us rupees.’

Gangaram s description of the flight of villagers of all ranks and oc-
cupations is reminiscent of Bankimchandra’s picture of the deserted

2 D.C. Sen, Vanga Sahitya Parichaya , vol. II, p. 1 169.

3 Vidyasundar , ed. Vasumati, pp. 4—6.

4 Riyaz-us-Salatin , p. 338.

5 Vangiya Sahitya Parishat Patrika , vol. XII, pp. 209-36.

The Small Voice of History

countryside during the famine of 1770. ‘As the bargis plundered the
villages’, says the poet, Villagers fled en masse', the Brahmin pandits
with their books, goldsmiths with weights and measures, grocers with
their goods, brass-smiths with copper and brass, blacksmiths with
their implements and potters with their wheels; fishermen fled with
their nets and ropes, and conchshell dealers with their saws . . . and
peasants and kaivarta fled lading their oxen with ploughs and paddy
seeds.’

This is the picture of a village community falling to pieces. The
consequences can be best described in the words of Holwell who, with
a merchant s sense, measured the volume of economic loss suffered by
the affected districts. The Marathas, he wrote,

committed the most horrid devastation and cruelties: they fed their
horses and cattle with mulberry plantations and thereby irreparably
injured the silk manufacture . . . On this event, a general face of ruin
succeeded. Many of the inhabitants, weavers and husbandmen fled.
The Arungs were in a great degree deserted; the lands un tilled . . . The
manufactures of the Arungs received so injurious a blow at this period,
that they have ever since lost their original purity and estimation; and
probably will never recover them again ... A scarcity of grain in all
parts; the wages of labour greatly enhanced; trade, foreign and inland,
labouring under every disadvantage and oppression.6

In the next two decades the ric^-hea ring soil of Burdwan was gradu-
ally nursed back to fertility by a rehabilitated peasantry. Cultivation
increased and the traditional prosperity of the district had almost
triumphed over the man-made ravages of the 1750s when famine
struck the land.

From the end of the autumn of 1769, that is, at the height of the
principal rice-growing season of the year, the signs of an approach-
ing famine were clearly visible, and by the end of November, when in
a normal year the peasants should have been already out in the fields
gathering harvest, the Governor-General in Council in a letter to
the Court of Directors was obliged to acknowledge the danger of an
impending catastrophe. ‘It is with great concern, Gentlemen , they

6 Holwell, Interesting Historical Events, vol. 1, pp. 121, 123, 124, 151.

Introduction to the Burdwan District Records

wrote, ‘that we are to inform you that we have a most melancholy pros-
pect before our eyes of universal distress for want of grain. Owing to
an uncommon drought that has prevailed over every part of the coun-
try, insomuch that the oldest inhabitants never remembered to have
known anything like it, and as to threaten a famine/7 In two months’
time the Directors were informed that the apprehensions had already
proved true.8 And by the summer of 1 770 the country lay writhing in
the throes of a murderous famine.

Hunters account of the particular severity with which the famine
pressed upon the western districts of Bengal is too well known to need
repetition. Burdwan no less than Birbhum suffered from the full
measure of its impact. Given her normal share of seasonal rains, Burd-
wan could be and was easily indeed the most prosperous of Bengal
districts and the least liable to famine. But in 1770, over a hundred
years before the Eden Canal was even conceived of, it was yet much too
defenceless against drought. For its most fertile part, the deltaic region
lying between the great rivers was, paradoxically enough, the most
exposed to this danger. Here the winter rice crop constituted, until
recently, the principal means of subsistence for the people,9 and a dry
winter, like that of 1769-70, by ruining the crops, could easily de-
prive the peasantry of a whole years stock. Secondly, cultivation in the
central and western parganas of the district depended mainly on
artificial irrigation with water drawn from tanks which, as Reza Khan
reported, had all dried up. Hunter s pithy summary of the proceedings
of the Council of 20 November 1769 concerning a petition from the
Raja of Burdwan gives a thumbnail picture of the resulting distress,
taking away any of its poignancy: ‘ Consultation of the 20th November
1769 — Representation of the Raja of Burdwan. Drought and dearness
of grain. Crop parched, and cut up for fodder for the cattle. Tanks dry.
Water insufficient for the inhabitants. Rubbee harvest backward, and
without rain will be destroyed. Ryuts deserting in large bodies/10

The rulers of the country, however, took good care to ensure that
distress and depopulation did not lead to deficiency in revenue

7 COD, 23 November 1769.

8 Ibid., 25 January 1770.

9 Burdwan District Gazetteer, pp. 99-100.

10 Hunter, Annals of Rural Bengal, p. 408.

40 The Small Voice of History

receipts. We have on record Warren Hastings staggering confession
that the net collections of 1771-2, that is, the term immediately fol-
lowing ‘the year of the Famine and Mortality’, exceeded even those of
1768-9, the year before the drought which caused the famine. 11 In
terms of the Company’s ledger the excess was justified as a partial com-
pensation for the losses sustained by the Government in the two years
of drought and famine from 1769 to 1 771 . At the cost of what great
human suffering the revenue apparatus was kept turning its usual
rounds is best described in the words of Warren Hastings himself. ‘It
was naturally to be expected,’ he wrote,

that the diminution of the Revenue shou’d have kept an equal pace
with the other consequences of so great a calamity. That it did not, was
owing to its being violently kept up to its former standard. To ascertain
all the means by which this was effected will not be easy . . . One tax,
however, we will endeavour to describe, as it may serve to account for
the Equality which has been preserved in the past collections, and to
which it has principally contributed. It is called Najay, and it is an
Assessment upon the actual inhabitants of every inferior description
of the Lands, to make up for the loss sustained in the Rents of their
neighbours who are either dead or have fled the country. This Tax,
though equally impolitic in its institution &c oppressive in the mode
of exacting it, was authorised by the antient and general usage of the
country. It had not the sanction of Government, but took place as a
matter of course . . . However irreconciliable to strict Justice, it afforded
a preparation to the State for occasional Deficiencies; it was a kind of
security against Desertion, by making the inhabitants thus mutually
responsible for each other; and precluded the inferior collector from
availing himself of the Pretext of waste or Deserted Lands to withhold
any part of his collections. But the same Practice which at another
Time and under different circumstances would have been beneficial,
became at this period an insupportable Burthen upon the inhabitants.
The Tax not being levied by any Fixed Rate or Standard, fell heaviest
upon the wretched survivors of those Villages which had suffered the
greatest Depopulation, and were of course the most entitled to the

11 COD, 3 November 1772.

Introduction to the Burdwan District Records

lenity of Government, It had also the additional evil attending it, in
common with every other variation from the regular Practice, that it
afforded an opportunity to the Farmers and Shicdars to levy other con-
tributions on the People under Color of it, and even to encrease this
to whatever magnitude they pleased, since they were in course of the
judges of the Loss sustained, and of the Proportion which the inhabi-
tants were to pay to replace it.12

Warren Hastings here refers to the ancient character of the najai> a
fact confirmed by Shore,13 not so much to vindicate it as perhaps to
explain away how this unauthorized collection ‘took place as a matter
of course, as the continuation of an old tradition. The truth, however,
was that such unauthorized collections in periods of distress could pass
unchecked only because there existed the atmosphere of a maniacal
drive for maximum revenue by the Company. And so far as tradition
mattered, there were equally if not more ancient usages permitting a
remission of revenue demands in a year of failure of crops due to natu-
ral calamities.14

Burdwan suffered like any other district from Reza Khans ruthless
squeeze. The half-hearted grant of remission in response to the Rajas
plaintive appeals amounted, in the last count, to less than a lakh of
rupees,13 and in a letter to the authorities Raja Tejchand wrote on
14 May 1771 that the revenues were paid up without balance in spite
of ‘the hardships and distresses that have befallen the ryots, the poor
and the inhabitants of this country from the famine.’16 It was in this
year of tamine that the Company raised from this district the highest

12 Ibid.

13 ‘Nuzzahs and Nuzzeranahs are as ancient as the Government.* Shore’s
minute, 18 June 1789. See Fifth Report vol. II, p. 20.

14 ‘In the case of fields which have been flooded, or where the rain-water has
been exhausted, or any non-preventable calamity has overtaken the crop before
reaping, so that the ryot has secured nothing, nor has he time enough left for
a second crop to be raised before the beginning of the next year — consider the
revenue as remitted.’ Aurangzib’s farman translated in j.N. Sarkars Mughal
Administration , pp. 205-6.

15 Hunter, op. cit., p. 400.

16 Ibid., p. 406.

42 The Small Voice of History

amount of revenue since 1760 — a net collection of Rs 40,57,432.17
The inevitable result of this policy of maximum exaction was a chronic
depletion of the resources of the district which, as Hunter says, had
been ‘the first to cry out and the last to which plenty returned/ In
fact, Burdwan did not fully recover from the effects of the famine until
the beginning of the next century. It could not have been otherwise,
for in the period immediately following the famine the district, far
from being nursed back to its natural health, was exploited systemati-
cally and without respite. The policies of the government of Warren
Hastings did not live up to his professions of sympathy for the famine-
stricken ryots, and the average of gross revenue demands (jama) on the
district in the twelve years from 1772-3 to 1783-4 was only about
ten per cent less than the highest ever (Rs 44,84,049-4- 1 1 in 1 764-5),
while the net receipts for the same period exceeded, year to year, those
of the twelve years ending in 1772 (see Table 1).

Table 1

Statement of Revenue Demands and Collections in Burdwan
from 1772-3 to 1783-418

Year

Gross Jama

Rs. As.

Ner Collection

Rs. As.

1772— 3

41,84,867

39,52,568

1773—4

39,17,929

38.80,494

1774—5

39,35,784

40,02,401

1775— 6

39,67,900

39,98,471

1776—7

39,98,062

39,07,220

1777—8

39,07,220

1778—9

39,58,427

40,80,958

1 779 — 80

41,05,958

38,23,560

1780—1

39,66,120

38,58,252

1781—2

39,66,120

41,74,524

1782—3

43,58,026

42,92,790

1783—4

43.58,026

42,89,172

17 Figure quoted from Grant’s Analysis. See Firminger, Fifth Report , vol. II,
p. 413.

18 For gross jama, vide BOR, 24 June 1788; for net collections, GGC , 22 June
1785.

Introduction to the Burdwan District Records

Cultivation encouraged by BazeZamin grants — difficulties in ascertaining
the value of land — confusion between rent and revenue — local variations;
forms of rent — Sanja and Khamar — two kinds of Khamar rent; labour
rent — not mentioned by contemporary writers — origins analysed — nature
ofBaze Zamin grants — corporate character of early village economy —
communal lands turned into chakran lands — Roy Royans definition —
brahmottarandmahatmn — begar — significance ofthe policy of resumption
of rent-free grants .

Statistics available at the present state of research do not permit us to
calculate with any precision the actual rate at which Burdwan or for
that matter any other district of Bengal recovered from the effects of
the famine of 1770. It is, however, certain that one of the factors
contributing most to the rehabilitation of the district was the generous
grant of baze zamin (rent-free tenure) made to willing settlers by the
landlords in order to counteract the effects of the famine. Till the
end of the eighteenth century the availability of land for cultivation
was always in excess of manpower required for it, and it had, there-
fore, been customary for proprietors to make such grants in order to
promote agrarian enterprise. The famine considerably accelerated the
process, which went on throughout the century, defying the Company’s
attempts to prohibit such ‘alienation’.

The case for the proprietors was very clearly stated by the Raja of
Burdwan. Asked by the Collector to explain why he had granted some
lands free of rent, he wrote: ‘I beg to acquaint you that I issue them
with a view to better the Country and increase its cultivation, waste
and jungle lands yielding no Revenue. I dispose of to the Ryots in Pyka-
ust Pottahs and Imah Sunriuds at small assessments to encourage
cultivation. The company sustain no loss by them whereas the country
is improved and Ryots made happy’ (p. 1 0). It was thus that under the
old zamindari system a very practicable solution was found for the
problem of disparity between the availability of land and the require-
ments of labour, which was in a ratio quite the reverse of what the
position is today. Lord Cornwallis’s policy of outright resumption of
rent-free lands as formulated in the Baze Zamin Regulations of August
1788 was, therefore, an unimaginative effort to boost the absolute

The Small Voice of History

amount of revenue by sacrificing the fundamental interests of agri-
culture. In a sense this policy differed little from Warren Hastings’
farming system which, too, was adopted as a method of probing into
the undeclared resources of the land in order to strike the highest ap-
proximation between its total value and the gross revenue demand.

It is not easy, however, to ascertain how the liberal grant of haze
zamin actually influenced the value of land. The difficulty arising from
the lack of statistical information on this point is further increased by
a confusion in terms common to many writers of the period. Grant,
for instance, puts ‘the valued medium rent of all the lands of Burd-
wan at Rs 2 per bigha in 1763-4, 19 but this estimate seems to have
been based on the proportion between the total jama and the amount
of land paying revenue. This confusion between revenue and rental
makes his figures unacceptable as a basis for any calculation of the value
of land.

In 1 793 the Collector was asked by the Board of Revenue to fix the
rent of land yielding two or more crops at Rs 2 per bigha in Mandal-
ghat (p. 78), while 1361 bighas in 27 villages sold in 1795-9 for
Rs 4,131 show an average of above Rs 2.20 What makes it difficult to
place any great reliance on these estimates is, however, the fact that the
lack of uniformity of tenure gave rise to many local variations about
which the authorities in Calcutta were but little aware, and which can-
not be covered either by calculations based on such meagre samples as
the sales mentioned above.

These variations made the task of a general assessment almost a
desperate affair. The problem became very acute when it was proposed
to introduce uniformity in patta throughout the province. The Govern-
ment desired to regularize the agreement between zamindars and ryots
in a way that would guarantee security of occupation and tenure for
the latter. But it was not willing to undertake a thorough investiga-
tion, as that would cost time, nor a thorough survey, as that would cost
money. Moreover, it was feared that such undertakings might subject
the existing administration to an excessive strain.

While the authorities at the centre thus sought to overcome the
difficulty of finding facts by convenient generalizations, the local

19 Fifth Report , vol. II, p. 416.

20 Vide appendix I, nos. 9, 10, 46, and 55.

Introduction to the Burdwan District Records 45

officers insistently advised against short cuts. The Collector wrote as
early as 1788 analysing the factors that made for wide variations in
assessment — how, for instance, rents were often adjusted to variations
in yield without any regard for the terms of an existing patta, how pre-
ferential rents were allowed to one class of ryots as against another, and
how the unpredictable floods of Burdwan constantly changed the
value of land by enriching some tracts with rich alluvium while ruining
others by deposits of sand, or even washing these away.21

Again in 1793 Samuel Davis, Collector, wrote objecting to the
introduction of flat rates at a maximum of Rs 2 per bigha for the so-
called first and second qualities of land in Mandalghat. In a remarkable
passage rich in local knowledge he suggested that such a classification
had no basis in facts. ‘The value of land in this Pergunnah,’ he wrote,

varies in different places more than the Board appear to be apprized of;
as an instance of which I need only mention, that land yielding on
crop, or that which the Board define of the 2nd quality, is found in
many places of more value, and bearing high rent, than land of the
1st quality yielding two crops in other places. This is owing both to
the quality and relative situation of the first, in regard to rivers to the
facility of obtaining water when, wanted for its cultivation, and at
other times, of preventing inundation. In the vicinity of a Bund which
has often broken and may therefore break again, land is sometimes
found less valuable though more productive in its crop, than land
secured by its situation from inundation when the Bunds fail; and
land where the crops are liable to injury from overflowing of the tide,
though its quality be as good as any in the Pergunnah yields less than
when more remote from the Hooghly river. These and many other
circumstances of a local nature, cause a variation in the rates of differ-
ent villages, which would not easily be reduced to the limits proposed
by the Board for the two descriptions or classes mentioned under the
terms 1 st and 2nd quality, nor would such an alteration or modification
of the rates as they now stand, increase the Revenue however it might
tend to accelerate . . . the improvement of the Pergunnah, for land of
the 2nd quality, which now pays in many instances 2-8 per Bega,
would by the proposed Nirk, as given in the prescribed form for a
grant, be reduced to 1-4, and as land of these descriptions is much

21 J, Kin lock’s Letter of 20 May 1788 in BOR, 24 June 1788,

The Small Voice of History

more abundant than of the 1 st quality, the loss would not be balanced
by increasing such of the latter as, now pays only 1-6 to 2 rupees per
Bega (the rate which the Board direct shall not be exceeded) more
especially as much of this 1st class or quality which already pays
3 rupees per Bega, would instead of increase, suffer by the Board’s plan
a reduction of one rupee per Bega. To this it may be added that a con-
siderable quantity of cotton, mulberry, Supari and Pawn cultivation,
now bearing rent from 26 to 4 Rs. per Bega, would by the terms of the
suggested plan, undergo a greater reduction in its assessment than any
other land. (pp. 78-9)

In spite of the difficulty in ascertaining the volume and rates of rent,
it is possible to get a sufficiently clear picture of the nature of rent in
Burdwan during the period under review.

On the eve of the Permanent Settlement and for a long time after
it we find throughout the countryside in Bengal a coexistence of money
rent with produce rent and labour rent. Of these the Government
of the East India Company was pleased to take into formal account
only the first two, for apparently in their revenue computations these
mattered most, while the entire phenomenon of labour rent remain-
ed camouflaged under the generic problem of haze zamin in a sector
of our rural economy considered by the landlords as their closed pre-
serve and jealously guarded by them from the grasping hand of the
administration.

Cash rent in Burdwan was known as Nagad , while produce rent
depending on the manner in which it was assessed fell into two
categories — Sanja and Khamar , the latter of which again was of two
kinds, Kut Khamar and Khal Khamar.22 The assessment in each par-
gana comprised all three sorts.

As defined in a report on Mandalghat (p. 264), the Sanja was
payable in kind with the quantity of grain specified. * Some fur-
ther details are available in a letter from an officer on deputation in
Bishnupur, where the prevailing forms of rent must have been more or

22 Khal in Bengali means a threshing floor, a place either in the field or in a
shed where the grain is trodden out of the husk . . . also, a place where the grain
of any individual of the village is piled up or stacked, oi where it was kept so
stacked until its value had been estimated by the Collector, and security for the
revenue due on it given * — Wilsons Glossary.

Introduction to the Burdwan District Records

less similar to those of Burdwan. The Sajah lands’, wrote Mr Hesilrige
in a letter dated 16March 1790, pay at all times the same, be the season
more or less favourable or the lands altogether unproductive. According
to their quality they pay from one and a half to five maunds of grain
pr. annum.’23

It is interesting for a modern observer to note that Mr Hesilrige even
spoke of the advantages of this system. ‘Many ryots’, he said, ‘holding
lands by this tenure and particularly those of Myhispoor are extremely
well off, for should they be do or [sic] producing a crop of rice and one
of cotton etc., nothing is paid for the cotton or whatever may be the
second crop.’ One has merely to compare this with the statement in the
Report on the recent census operations in West Bengal characterizing
Sanja rent in Bankura as ‘a serious evil’ which ‘keeps the cultivator
under an ever-increasing load of debt and prohibits any form of agri-
cultural development.’ It has been pointed out in this Report that the
Sanja, as it prevails today, is a relatively modern renovation introduced
by mahajan landlords who purchase ryoti holdings originally pay-
ing a low money rent and resettle these on terms of produce rent, thus
reducing the cultivators ‘to helpless dependence on a small class of
grasping usurers.’24 The difference between these two attitudes about
the same problem for the same district is actually a measure of the
change or the lack of it registered in the rural economy of Bengal in the
last hundred and fifty years: a form of feudal rent, the very existence
of which was once conditioned by the absence or weakness of money
economy, has been resurrected in our age under the direct patronage
of moneybags.

Khamar rent like Sanja must have been as old as feudal economy
itself. Its existence on a very large scale had already been noticed by the
first British administrators.25 The specific form in which it existed
in Burdwan is described in the Collector’s letter to the Board, dated
20 May 1788.

The Comar lands have no settled tenants but are cultivated by con-
tract, the terms being various in various parts of rhe district. In gene-
ral however the farmer engages with the ryotts of the villages most

23 BOR , 29 March 1790.

24 Census of India, 1951, vol. VI, pt LA, p. 220.

25 Firmingefs Introduction to Fifth Repon , vol. I, p. cix.

The Small Voice of History

contiguous for their cultivation and when the harvest is gathered in,
it is divided by established propositions [sic] between the farmer and
cultivator of one half or even one third, or the cultivator in some cases
retains the whole produce and pays a certain amount in money calcu-
lated upon the price which the same article may bear in the adjacent
markets.26

The two customary ways of determining the share between the pro-
ducer and his superior gave rise to the two variations of this rent, name-
ly, Kut Khamar and Khal Khamar, both of which were current in
Burdwan and the neighbouring districts, The following description is
taken from A. Hesilrigcs letter cited above:

The Coot is an estimate of the quantity of grain a field will produce —
this estimate is made by five or more of the principal men of the village
who with the Gomastah and ryot repair to the spot; the half of what-
ever they estimate the field will produce must be paid to Government,
be the ryot a loser or a gainer by it.

When the harvest is got in and the grain trodden out, the Gomastah
and ryot make a division of it, the former taking from each heap as
much as he can draw at once with both hands as the further advantage
of Government, and a somewhat less quantity for himself. This is the
Caal Khamar.

The straw in both instances is the property of the ryot.27

It is not possible, due to lack of data, to ascertain the relative impor-
tance, in size or in rental, of lands paying produce rent in Burdwan. But
the fact that rural Bengal was as yet largely in a state of natural
economy, and that the lack of uniformity of currency and the consequent
abuses of batta hindered the progress of money into the countryside,
justify rhe belief that Sanja and Khamar rents taken together must have
constituted a good part of the rental. We have on record Verelsts
figures for the 24-Parganas in 1767 where Khamar lands occupied 33-
35 per cent of the total area of ryoti lands in tillage and paid about
29 per cent of the revenue for the same.28 T hat might well have been

26 BOR, 24 June 1788.

27 Ibid., 29 March 1790.

28 Verelst estimated the size of cultivated ryoti lands as 5,91,172 bighas
paying an annual revenue of Rs 10,12,305 and Khamar lands as 1,98,305

Introduction to the Burdwan District Records

the picture for the entire province before the famine. And after the
famine, as cultivation spread in Burdwan and its rice trade prospered
under the direct patronage of the Government — which entered the
market as the single biggest purchaser — the peasant must have looked
upon produce rent as a lesser evil than the harassing uncertainties of
the currency.

Although rent in kind thus provided for the cultivator a naive
escape from the clutches of the shroff in one respect, he was trapped
at another end, even more inextricably, in the same mesh of usury
because of produce rent itself. The Khamar ryot’s dependence on his
superior for advance in cash required for cultivation, and payable in
crop together with the rent, exposed him to a whole series of usurious
manipulations on the part of the zamindar who often indulged in
moneylending as a side line. This abuse of Khamar rent, about which
Harry' Verelst had already warned his ‘Supravisors’ in 1 769, must have
considerably increased in the later period when, apart from a still larger
number of the old zamindars taking to usury in order to boost their
declining fortunes, there were many usurers whom the farming system
had invested with estates converted into zamindaris in due course.
Verelst s warning, therefore, holds good for our period with still greater
force. ‘The Comar lands, he said,

having no native tenants, are cultivated by contract. The custom and
terms of contract are various in various districts, but, in general, there
is one settled rule. An advance in money is made by the Zemeendar,
to the cultivator, by the help of which he tills and improves the land.
When the crops are cut and gathered in, they are generally divided be-
tween the cultivator and the Zemeendar; from one third to one half to
the cultivator, and the remainder to the Zemeendar; when the former
accounts with the latter for the amount of the advances, which are
often taxed by the Zemeendar with an heavy interest, or fraudulently
exceeded by an arbitrary valuation, far below the market price of the
goods or products of the lands, in which he is paid.29

bighas paying Rs 2,91 ,842. Verelst, A View of the English Government in Bengal

(1772), p. 221.

29 Verelst, View of the Rise, Progress and Present State of the English Government
in Bengal , p. 234.

50 The Small Voice of History

The evils of Sanja were even more palpable. The invariability of the
quantity of produce due as rent made the cultivator quite defenceless
in the face of exigencies of the season. A drought or inundation by
ruining the crops would leave him only two alternate ways of escape
from the rent collector s unyielding demands: desertion or still further
surrender to the usurer. This, along with other circumstances, might
explain the loss of revenue due to desertion, which occurs in every
jama wasil baki account of Mandalghat, the pargana most exposed to
floods. At a time when irrigation works and embankments were in a
state of utter ruin, when the district lived from year to year under the
constant threat of the Damodar rising in spate, things may not have
been at all so easy for the Sanja ryot, as Mr Hesilrige imagined.

While produce rent was officially recognized as a constituent of the
Company’s revenue, the reports, statements, and accounts of this
period make no mention of the existence of labour rent in any form.
Even more curious is the fact that the greater part of labour rent
originated from the so-called rent-free lands or baze zamin. This is of
course easily explained by the characteristic confusion in the economic
vocabulary of the East India Company. By an erroneous identification
of revenue with rent, lands which yielded no revenue for the Govern-
ment were considered rent-free. The fortunes of the Company were by
no means affected by this misunderstanding, but, accepted uncritically
by generations of scholars, this has succeeded so far in concealing one
of the principal forms of exploitation of the peasantry of Bengal in
the eighteenth century.

The main source of labour rent in this period was the various forms
of labour service rendered to their grantors by direct producers
holding rent-free lands under different denominations. The origin of
labour rent has, therefore, to be sought in the origins of baze zamin.

We have it on all authority that long before the rise of the zamindari
estates it was customary for the residents of a village to allot waste lands
as compensation for certain services received by the community.30
Grants were often made to persons connected with the administration
and defence of the village like patwaris and paiks as well as to several

30 See, for instance, Phillips’s Tagore Law Lectures quoted in TheZemindary
Settlement of Bengal, vol. I, appendix, p. 37.

Introduction to the Burdwan District Records

categories of communal producers and manufacturers like blacksmiths
and potters. Even under the Mughals, when the introduction of re-
latively more standardized surveys and assessments established a
greater degree of official control over landed property, subordinate
officers could still grant away small quantities of land free of rent, pro-
vided, as Colebrooke says, the villagers consented to it.31 This semi-
official recognition of the right to make a grant of land by common
consent possibly indicates a historical memory of the original corporate
character of our rural economy.

Subsequently, with the transformation of: zamindars into proprietors
and the consequent absorption of much communal property into their
private estates, a considerable amount of the free lands turned into
freeholds paying in cash or in crop. At the same time the zamindars
regranted a large part of the lands ‘free of rent’ on the condition that
the services of the grantees were now placed at the disposal of the
zamindar rather than that of the community. In other words, communal
lands were turned into chakran lands, a process very striking in its
similarity to what happened in the Danubian provinces where, as an
eminent writer has observed, ‘the labour of the free peasants on their
common land was transformed into corvee for the thieves of the
common land.’ The grantees of such chakran, mostly peasant producers
tilling their own lands, now settled in the nucleated village around the
zamindars mansion rendering a multitude of services to the lord as
washermen, barbers, blacksmiths, potters, sweepers, carpenters, and
above all as paiks, barkandazes , and attendants directly associated
with the job of maintaining law and order and collecting revenues.32
These numerous services actually represent the surplus labour, that is,
labour rent, appropriated by the zamindar from the chakran ryots.

31 Colebrooke, Remarks on the Husbandry and Internal Commerce of Bengal,
para 93.

32 There were the various rent-free tenures granted by the zamindars to some
people for their religious merit (e.g. Brahmins and Vaishnavas) as also to certain
occupational groups, who performed essential services. Among the occupational
groups enjoying inam lands are mentioned fishermen, oil manufacturers, mat-
makers, Bagdis, tailors, carpenters, ferrymen, minstrels, milkmen, cobblers,
weavers, agradanis and a number of others.’ T. Raychaudhuri, Bengal Under
Akhar and Jahangir, p. 35.

The Small Voice of History

A most valuable, though little known, statement by the Roy Royan
dated 3 1 August 1787 may be reproduced here in further confirmation
of the above analysis of chakran lands as providing the typically feudal
fund of labour rent. In reply to an inquiry by the Board of Reve-
nue, the Roy Royan reported:

Chauckeraun lands originated with the zemindaries . . . Their nature
is as follows: the receipt of the tevenues collected from the villages and
other lands as well as the defence and protection of those places is in
general entrusted to the Mofussil Puttawarries, Pykes, Chokeedars,
Thanedars etc., all of whom receive a part of their allowances in
cash and the remainder in land. The amlah of the zemindars sudder
cutchcrry, whose salaries are by ancient age very small, are allowed also
an inconsiderable quantity of land. An allowance of land is likewise
given to the same [sic] of the Horsemen and Burkundosses, who not
being attached to any particular Thauneh, remain at the zemindars
sudder Cutchery and are occasionally deputed on the breaking out of
any disturbance to protect the Ryotts and travellers from Robbers and
other Disturbers of the peace, and who are also employed in escorting
remittances of the treasure to the Huzzoor, many of these however re-
ceive the whole of their cash. All the lands so bestowed are called
Chaukeraun.33

Details given in a letter (28 December 1787) of J. Sherburne, Col-
lector of Birbhum, closely conform to the Roy Royan s statement for
the whole province. The description of the several categories of
chakran ryots of Birbhum may be taken as typical of the western
districts of Bengal:

Tanadars with their Pykes. An establishment for the general safety and
peace of the Pergunnah; to attend and guard the Pergurinah Cutcherry
during the collections; the remittances from the Mofussil to the
Sudder Cutcherry; and at this particular period to prevent the Beigird
(Begar?) ryots carrying off iheir crops before they have paid their rents.

Dulloys. — Watchmen in each village they serve as guides convey
orders, are under the direction of the Tanadar, assist him in the appre-
hending of Dacoits and occasionally the farmer or Gomastah in col-
lecting the rents from the Ryotts.

33 BOR , 7 September 17 87.

Introduction to the Burdwan District Records

Cutwalls. Their express business in their respective villages is to
circulate the Tullub Chithies for rent, and compel the attendance of
the ryots at the Cutcherry; their duty except keeping accounts is the
same as that of Kurmcharries in other districts.34

It should be clear from the above descriptions how the two most
essential aspects of the zamindar s function, that is, the maintenance
of peace and the collection of revenues, depended on the labour service
of the holders of chakran lands.

It would be wrong, however, to consider the chakran lands as
covering the entire sector of the zamindar’s secret appropriation of
labour rent. Certain other forms of lakheraj holdings like brahmottar
and mahatmn also, under certain circumstances, produced similar
profits for the zamindar in his capacity as grantor. Thus a brahmottar
grant was not always a purely charitable endowment, for the poor
Brahmin, if he tilled the land himself, had to payback the zamindar
with services either as a village schoolteacher or as a priest for which
he received no remuneration Mahatran grants, sometimes allotted to
the village elite, some of whom were direct producers themselves, also
elicited certain unpaid services connected with the local administration
and the collection of revenues.

Apart from these, the brute form of labour rent, known as begar , was
also common in the countryside, and some of the letters in this volume
indicate how the East India Company made good use of it as a kind
of corvee in its road works in the western districts of Bengal.35

It is well known how, from the very outset, the Government of the
East India Company looked upon the haze zamin of Bengal as a sort
of gold mine alienated by the natives from its rightful proprietors, the
Government. In fact the phrase ‘alienated lands’, commonly used in all
official writings to denote baze zamin, is itself the expression of a
complete lack of historical understanding solemnized into a policy.
Many of the early administrators like Mr Johnston of Burdwan, who
had ‘taxed the whole of this land at 9 annas per Bega, without regard
to what was really applied to the purposes it was intended for,36 had

34 Ibid., 17 October 1787.

35 See Rustar Kavita by a village poet in D.C. Sen’s Vanga Sahitya Parichaya ,
vol. II, pp. 1430-2, for forced labour used on Rankins road works.

36 Verelst, op. cit., p. 217.

The Small Voice of History

the tendency of considering it as a convenient fund for making up
deficits in revenue receipts. Policy-makers like James Grant on their
part developed this attitude into a full-fledged theory advocating the
total resumption of baze zamin as a fundamental aspect of reform of
the Company’s revenue policy. The Baze Zamin Regulations of 1788
were the logical product of the past twenty years’ effort to boost the
absolute amount of revenue in the easiest way, that is, by confiscating
the accumulated gains of cultivation without raking the trouble of
raising productivity by improvement either in agrarian relations or
in agricultural methods. As the Fifth Report says, this attempt to take
over all the rent-free grants dating since the Diwani failed. The
Government succeeded in appropriating only an inconsiderable frac-
tion of the total amount of baze zamin.37 In spite of this failure, how-
ever, the series of administrative and legal measures adopted by the
East India Company to resume rent-free lands are of much historical
significance. They stand for the efforts of the mercantile representatives
of a comparatively superior economic system to transform a backward
economy by converting a large fund of labour rent into money rent
in a way suited to the requirements of its financial transactions. The
failure of this effort merely proves how the natural economy of Bengal
was to die hard.

Ill

Burdwans unbroken tradition of economic prosperity — early difficulties —
abolition of the sayer — pressure of revenue demands — confiscation of the
Rajas property — defaulting farmers — the case of Baranasi Ghose —
inadequacies of law. Decennial Settlement — sale of the Rajas estate —
difficulties of Rani Bishnukumari — land sold in lots — significance of the
sales; ruin of irrigation — tanks — the system of overflow irrigation — decay
of irrigation works — Zamindari embankments — Willcocks's views — ruin
due to fundamental maladjustment of social responsibilities — Collectors
plea for improvement in pulbandi works — difficulties continue throughout
the period — vicious circle .

Of all the ancient districts of Bengal, Burdwan alone survived, eco-
nomically, the vicissitudes of early British rule. Other districts like

37 Fifth Report , vol. I, pp. 50-1 .

Introduction to the Burdwan District Records 55

Murshidabad, Dacca, Dinajpur, Rajshahi, Birbhum, and Nadia — all
suffered a swift decline in fortune either because the fall of the native
Government deprived them of their political and economic importance,
as in the case of the first two of these districts, or because the princi-
pal zamindari houses were too weak to resist the pressure of the East
India Company's revenue policies, as was the case in the others. Burd-
wan stood the test well enough to come down to our days with a relat-
ively uninterrupted tradition of economic prosperity. But this was
not achieved without conflict. The zamindars of Burdwan, like those
of other districts, were also driven from pillar to post and dragged
through the usual procedure of humiliation and house arrest, of mort-
gage, sale, and attachment of properties. But unlike the zamindars of
Rajshahi, Nadia, and Dinajpur they survived it all, and with an
amazing degree of resilience changed over from the old zamindari
system to the new order of Cornwallis with but a few cuts and scrat-
ches. The bulk of the correspondence in this volume tells the story of
this interregnum of twenty -two years from the end of the Collectorship
of J. Kinlock to that of Y. Burges, a period of shifts, uncertainties, and
the eventual stabilization of the zamindari of Burdwan under radically
changed conditions.

The difficulties of the zamindari of Burdwan had commenced with
the death of Raja Tiiakchand. His successor the infant RajaTejchand
permitted himself to be guided by the opinions of a number of selfish
courtiers, many of whom, like Dayachand, held some of the largest
estates in the district. They did their best to keep the Raja away from
the influence of his wise and capable mother Bishnukumari.

The following extracts from a very long and pathetic petition sent
by the Rani to the Presidency in 1787 would give some idea of the
atmosphere of intrigue, directly fostered by Nabakrishna and Ganga
Govinda Singh, in which the young Raja grew up.

The Governor General and Council honored Maha Raja Deraje
Tejechund Behadre his successor and myself conformably to the Peti-
tion. Mr. Hastings became after this Governor General.

Bridge Kishore Roy and Prawn Kishore Metre my servants un-
gratefully plundered and destroyed my House and the Raje and on the
account Maha Raja, being about four years of age and me a helpless
woman I considered even the saving of my life a great chance. Some-
time after this General Clavering and other Gentlemen arrived from

56 The Small Voice of History

Europe, and I having in consequence of the ingratitude of my former
servants appointed others, entered my complaint, conformably to
which the Gentlemen having made enquaries, their ingratitude was
proved and they being dismissed the Gentlemen ordered me to take
the Charge of transmitting the Companys Revenue and of the edu-
cation of Maharaja myself, conformably to which orders I applied
myself to transmitting the revenue and to the Education of the Raja —
General Clavering and Colonel Monson died after this and my un-
grateful servants obtained access to Mr. Hastings by collusion, and
according to their representations Mr. Hastings giving these Ingrates
the charge and direction sent them to Burdwan . . . after the death of
Bridge Kishore Roy and Prawn Kishore Metre, son of the said Roy, and
Juggutnarain brother of the said Metre appearing both before the
Governor General procured from various ill Counsels the appointment
of Sezawul for Raja Nobkissen and took him with them to Burd-
wan, from having this my Son and myself departed for Calcutta and
Mr. Ducarell taking a hundred sepoys with him took away the Rajah
by force from me, at a place called Bassbareah and carried him to
Burdwan, placing fifty sepoys as a Guard (to be defrayed at my charge)
on myself, seeing myself oppressed in this Degree, and not allowed to
see my son who is dearer to me than life, or Soul, I returned to Burdwan
with the sepoys; at my return they kept the Raje separated from me and
Mr. Ducarell sent me forcibly to a place called Ambooah. After some-
time I said to this Gentleman that as my son was yet a child, & Dearer
to me than life or fortune how could 1 possibly leave him, and the Raje,
Mr. Ducarell answered that he had no remedy that it was the Gover-
nors order — Being at Amboah the Harcarrah Mootyram and others so
beset every side of my House that it was not possible even for an Ant
to escape; I had no notice of my sons situation nor had he of mine —
In this manner a space of four year elapsed and 1 was even (during that
time) destitute of food or Clothing. After this my ungrateful servants
joining themselves to others, fraudulently rook the Maha Rajah with
them to Calcutta and from their bad Counsel giving him no other
place to stay in they carried him to live at Raja Nobkissens, & had him
there at their option. The Maha Raja went afterwards to pay his res-
pects to Mr. Hastings and represented that his life was, nearly at an
end from the various distress he had undergone — That Mr. Hastings
should excuse him; and reappoint his mother. The Governor General

Introduction to the Burdwan District Records

answered that he should that Day return to his House and what he
requested should be granted my ungrateful servants then instigated the
Maha Raja on various manners tho’ he did not attend to their insti-
gations and they placing Nucco. Dutt, Deachund, Nilcaunt, Kereck
the son of Bedabund, &c others near 40 or 50 Debauched people with
the Raja told them to exert themselves in such manner as to make the
Raja forget even his mothers name, the Raja was at that time 14 years
of age when these Debauched People fraudulently urging him on with
an evil intention took him away to Burdwan where they initiated him
in such evil ways that he had no concern left for either House, life or
Country and they confidently did whatever they liked — Mr. Hastings
hearing this sent for these abandoned people. — The Maha Raja then
wrote that he would not again act in such a manner, and that these
abandoned people should not have any access to him. But these very
people afterwards instigated him to such a Degree in evil ways; that it
is beyond the power of expression — His life is all that remains to him
at the time of my being beset on every side in my house by Mooty Ram:
the Hircarrah, a sister of the Rajas was with me who died from the
strictness of the Confinement. Hearing this the Maha Rajah came to
me and withdrew the guard which uncompassed me on every side . . .
Mr. Hastings after this departed for Europe, and Mr. Macpherson
became Governor General and having presented an Arzee to him was
sent for to the Presence. — Having conformably to these orders arrived
in Calcutta the ungrateful servants and evil disposed people brought
the Maha Raja thro* ill advise to Calcutta likewise, & joining him with
Gunga Govin Sing caused him to live there & had him at their dis-
posal. It is not in the power of writing to express the ill example they
set him.38

The estrangement which, as in the case of the zamindari of Raj-
shahi, developed into a lifelong hostility between mother and son,
very seriously affected the destinies of the district. But the root of the
problem lay much deeper than the question of management, for the

38 BOR 1 5 June 1787. The document enclosed with the Councils letter to
the Board, dated 13 June 1787, is entitled, ‘A Sercient [sic] Account of the
troubles & Distresses of the Maha Rannee of Burdwan represented to the
exalted Presence’.

58 The Small Voice of History

crisis of the zamindari continued to exist even when Dayachand was
no more and the Rani took over from his son soon after the Permanent
Settlement. Burdwan like the rest of Bengal suffered from an organic
maladjustment which arose from the simple fact that the East India
Company's fiscal policy was incompatible with the old zamindari
system. It was Company’s policy of appropriating an ever larger share
of the zamindari revenue which involved the Raja and his mother in
a series of inextricable difficulties.

The resources of the Burdwan zamindari were hardly affected in any
substantial sense by the abolition of the sayer (defined by the Fifth
Report as ‘inland customs, duties and taxes, or generally whatever was
collected on the part of Government and not included in the mehaul
or land revenue’). In 1 786 the Raja prayed for a deduction of Rs 82,868
on this account. 39 This represents less than two per cent of the average
annual jama of the district for the entire period of fifteen years since
1770, a fact which proves the utter insignificance of the proportions
of the internal trade of the district to its total economy. And considering
that Burdwan was one of the richest commercial districts of Bengal at
this time, this may be accepted as a clear indication how trade existed
as a mere outgrowth in pores of a predominantly agrarian economy.

The fiscal battle was therefore mostly fought in the principal sector
of zamindari resources, namely land revenue. As the Burdwan Dis-
trict Gazetteer says, ‘the chief object of the administration at this time
seems to have been to make the Maharaja pay his revenue, and all other
considerations were subordinated to this.’ One has merely to turn the
pages of the present volume or to go through the consultations of the
Board of Revenue to realize the justice of this observation. In 1786 the
Raja prayed for a deduction of Rs 82,868 on account of the abolition
of the sayer and Rs 47,000 on account of losses arising from the cons-
truction of Rankins military road across ‘lands yielding the finest
crops’. Although the Collector, J. Kinlock, considered these as ‘just
grounds’, the Board summarily rejected the plea.40 Pressed for the
amount of revenue still due to him, Rs 1 ,76,462 in all, the Raja wrote
to the Collector:

39 See enclosure to J. Kinlocks Letter of 25 May 1786 in BOR, 7 June 1786.

40 BOR, 7 June 1786.

Introduction to the Burdwan District Records 59

To you, Sir, I have before pointed out the extremity of distress which
I have laboured under to effect the payments of my Revenue etc. you
are likewise well acquainted with the considerable retrenchments
which I have been obliged to make in every branch even of my most
necessary household expenses, and of the heavy loss I have submitted
to in borrowing of money rather than fail in my Engagements with the
Company. If you represent this circumstances [sic] in a proper man-
ner I make no doubt but the Gentlemen of the Board of Revenue will
indulge me, by allowing me to enter into some agreement for the pay-
ment of this balance — and I bind myself to you to pay into your hands
within ten days the sum of Rupees 76,462-7-9 — and for the remaining
lack I engage to discharge the whole by there [sic] equal instalments in
the first three months of the new year’s settlement.

The Collector wrote to the Board saying that the zamindar was truly
in distress and that granted the indulgence prayed for, ‘I can venture
to assure them [the Board of Revenue] from the promises he has made
me, that he will pay his Balances at the stated Periods mentioned in his
Letter.’ An extract from the Board’s reply may be cited here as a typical
example of the attitude adopted on most occasions of this nature: ‘We
lose no time in informing you’, they wrote to the Collector, that we
consider the Pleas urged by the Zemindar as totally inadmissible, both
with respect to the Balance of the last, and the Revenue of the present
year. We therefore desire that you immediately call upon him for
Payment of his Balances; and should he not have complied with that
order within 3 days after receipt of this Letter, you will then attach
such quantity of his Private Property (beginning with his House and
Furniture) as may suffice to discharge the amount.’41 In 1787 the
Board struck off from the zamindar’s account an amount of Rs 70,000
traditionally granted for expenses connected with the collection of
revenues ( mazkurat ) and charities.42 The autumn flood of the same
year followed by a cyclone resulted in heavy damages; nine of the lower
parganas were most seriously affected and it was clear from all ac-
counts, including those from the Collector and the Commercial Resi-
dents, that there would be no winter crop to speak of. ‘The crops and

41 Ibid., 23 June 1786.

42 Ibid., 8 June 1787.

The Small Voice of History

Houses of the Ryotts’, wrote the Raja, each were considerably damag-
ed and many people and a quantity of cattle perished . . . The Ruby or
October crop has three times been sown but to no effect and if the
Ryots are prest to pay their Revenues at this period they will leave their
Houses and the Company will suffer and [r/c] heavy Balance of reve-
nue.* The same sound common sense was echoed by the Collector in
his letter ro the Board (23 November 1787) when he argued: As it
has ever been my study to admit of no deviation in the punctual Pay-
ments of each Kist where I could with propriety enforce it without its
being detrimental to the Province, I with reluctance now candidly
declare that if I enforce the Payment of the Revenues by harsh Meas-
ures, after the calamities that have taken place, without a particular
Investigation it may have such an Effect upon the Provinces as will not
again be easily remedied as the misfortunes which have occurred ulti-
mately fall on the Ryotts.’ Little importance, however, was attached
by the Board to the Collector’s report. After a soulless debate which
was distinguished by neither imagination nor wisdom, it was decided
that ‘they cannot admit of a temporary calamity constituting any just
ground of Government’s granting remissions on a settled & Moderate
Jumma, it being under such circumstances incumbent on the Zemin-
dars, and not on Government to Grant such relief as may be wanted to
the Ryotts’, and that they saw no necessity for any suspension of the
Zemindar’s payments.’43

By 1 788 the unpaid balance of revenue accumulated to the amount
of over three lakhs of rupees.44 In the summer of April 1788 the Col-
lector, acting on the Board’s orders, attached the Rajas property and
household furniture, ‘having stationed peons over such places as I had
reason to believe might contain effects of value, particularly upon his
Zenana where I understand it has ever been his custom (agreeable
to the practice of the country) to deposit his most valuable effects.’45
And on 1 July 1788 the Board of Revenue ordered the sale of pargana
Mandalghat.46

43 Ibid., 7 December 1787.

44 BLR. pp. 16-17.

45 BOR. 22 April 1788.

46 BLR. p. 16.

Introduction to the Burdwan District Records

Much of the Ra ja s difficulties in clearing che constant accumulation
of arrears arose from the failure of his farmers and under-tenants to pay
up what they owed to the zamindar as rent. In May 1 789 the Collector
informed the Board that seventy farmers owed the Raja a total amount
exceeding three lakhs of rupees in rent for 1788-9. The Raja pleaded
his helplessness to collect it (pp. 16-18). In 1793 the Raja again
complained that the Sadar Mustajirs or principal farmers defaulted in
the payment of two lakhs of rupees due to him (p. 37). The difficulty
recurs again and again throughout the period and it did much to un-
dermine the credit of Rani Bishnukumari herself when she took over
the management of the zamindari.47

There was nothing in law to help the zamindar out. While the Gov-
ernment could and usually did enforce payment of revenue by the seiz-
ure of both the person and the property of a defaulting zamindar — it
had actually done so in the case of Srinarain Mustafi, zamindar of
Chitua, by putting up to sale his entire property down to the last bigha
of land and by virtually condemning him to life imprisonment — what
was a zamindar to do with a farmer who would not pay his rent? He
could, of course, be asked to seek redress at a Diwani Adalat. But that,
as everybody knew, was a long and arduous process which could be
stalled by various means, some of which were as simple as the mere
change of the defendant s residence from the area under the jurisdiction
of the court concerned. In any case the pace of legal procedure lagged
far behind the regularity with which the Government insisted on its
revenue payments and the readiness with which it punished defaulting
zamindars.

The anomaly was very clearly exposed in the case of the famous
Calcutta tycoon Baranasi Ghosh who, as Sadar Mustajir of parg?ma
Balia, owed the Raja a total of Rs 47,643 in arrears of rent for 1792-
3, and paying no heed to the Rajas importunities he sat safe in
Calcutta, away from the jurisdictional reach of the Diwani Adalat of
Burdwan. The Collector wrote to the Board saying that unless Bara-
nasi Ghosh was brought to book, it would merely encourage other
defaulters to withhold payment of rent to the zamindar. And he clearly

47 See pp. 243, 269 and 278-9 of this volume for many instances of obs-
tructions caused by defaulting farmers under the Rani.

The Small Voice of History

sympathized with the Raja who ‘with great reason urges the rule of
our Civil Courts as well as the process authorized by government for
the recovery of their own balances as arguments to induce you to cause
the above-mentioned debtors person to be immediately attached and
sent to prison unless he satisfies the demand. He is of opinion that by
this process he would be more likely to obtain a speedy satisfaction of
his claims than by a suit in the Dewanny Adawlut to which Govern-
ment in its own concerns have determined that the debtors and not
the creditor must have recourse in cases where the cause of action is
disputable.’ The inconsistency is even more vigorously challenged in
a later communication. ‘The difficulty’, wrote the Collector on 9 Jan-
uary 1794,

I found in realizing the last kist of Aughun from the Maharajah indu-
ces me to listen to his earnest request of representing to you the hard-
ship he sustains from one of his renters; who, destitute of good faith,
and availing himself of the delay that necessarily attends the institu-
tion of law process for the recovery of arrears of rent, is encouraged to
withhold from him his just dues. He begs leave to submit it to your
consideration, whether or no it can be possible for him to discharge his
engagements to Government, with that punctuality which the Regula-
tions require, unless he be armed with powers as prompt to enforce
payment from his renters as Government has been pleased to authorize
the use of in regard to its claims on him, and he seems to think it must
have proceeded from oversight rather than from any just and avowed
principle, that there should be established two methods of judicial
process under the same Government the one summary and efficient
for the satisfaction of its own claims, the other tardy and uncertain in
regard to the satisfaction of claims due to its subjects more especially
in a case like the present, where ability to discharge the one demand
necessarily depends on the other demand being previously realized,
(pp. 69, 71-2, 92-3)

The legal anomaly was i n essence the logical expression of a fundamental
maladjustment between an archaic pattern of subinfeudation and the
necessities of a new agrarian order. Subinfeudation of the kind
reported by the Collector in his letter of 8 June 1793 (p. 50) must have
existed in Burdwan, as elsewhere in Bengal, since ages; the intermediate

Introduction to the Burdwan District Records

gradation of tenancies between the landlord and the primary producer
is common to all feudal societies. Only under the old system in Ben-
gal the drive for maximum revenue had never been the sine qua non
of administration, nor, consequently, had it been necessary for the
zamindar to pass on to his tenants a corresponding degree of fiscal
pressure from the top. But once, as under the East India Company,
prompt and accurate revenue returns were made the first object of
government itself, it was necessary that the tension should be transmit-
ted to the very base, down to the meanest ryot, in order to give cohe-
sion and consistency to the entire structure. Within this framework
the notorious ‘Haptani (Regulation Vll of 1799), which armed the
zamindars with wide powers of distraint, was indeed the most effective
way of repairing the inadequacies of the laws of 1793.

Under these circumstances it was not easy for the Board to make the
Raja of Burdwan agree to a Decennial Settlement on their own terms.
Much haggling went on between the two parties throughout the
summer of 1 79 1 . In June that year Tejchand himself came over to Cal-
cutta to conduct the negotiations in person , and at one point when the
Board in utter exasperation gave the Raja an ultimatum of twenty-four
hours to say yes or no to the proposed doul bandobast , all hopes of a
settlement seemed to have broken down. The first year of the decennial
period having thus been spent in bargaining, a nine years settlement
was eventually concluded with the Raja on 27 June 1791. 48

The settlement brought no immediate relief, for it contained no
basic solution of the Rajas difficulties. On the contrary, the deve-
lopments which followed make it amply clear how hollow had been the
claims of Philip Francis and Lord Cornwallis that a permanent settle-
ment, unaccompanied by studied safeguards for either ryots or
zamindars, would of itself constitute a panacea. Early in 1793, that is,
towards the end of the very first term of the new settlement, the Raja
applied for a suspension of six lakhs of rupees, at the rate of two lakhs
each for the current year and the next two, promising to pay it up in
equal instalments during the last five years ofhis novennial engagement.

48 The Proceedings of the Board of Revenue for 6-27 June and 3 August
1791 contain full details of the negotiation over the Decennial Setdement of
Burdwan.

The Small Voice of History

In case this was refused, the Raja proposed to relinquish his zamin-
dari altogether on condition of being allowed an yearly allowance of
Rs 1 ,86,000 for himself and family. The Collector wrote to the Board
in support of the Raja s application, only reducing the amount propos-
ed for suspension by one lakh and suggesting corresponding alterations
for the terms of repayment. The Board s reply was a stern refusal ac-
companied by censure on the Collector for not having yet put the Raja
in jail. The Collector apologized and immediately removed the Raja,
who was very ill at the time, to ‘close confinement in the prison , only
to report a week later that in spite of the punishment and still further
deterioration of health the Raja showed no sign of paying up. Accord-
ing to the Collector, the only alternative left to the Government was,
therefore, to realize the arrears ‘either from the prompt payment at
the time of sale or from the absolute disposal of his lands’ (pp. 36-9,
42-4).

In October 1793 the Raja himself came out with a proposal to sell
off half of his entire estate to his mother; by the end of the year he was
obliged to borrow two lakhs of rupees from merchants in order to
clear the winter instalment of revenue, and added to what he already
owed to Nimu Mallik of Calcutta, his personal debt amounted in all
to Rs 6,75,000. At the same time by January 1794 the balance of
revenue due to him had piled up to the huge total of Rs 6,99,602. On
27 January 1 794 the Collector asked the Magistrate of Burdwan ‘to
receive into your custody and commit to close confinement Maharaja
Tezchand, Zemindar of Burdwan, only to discover the very next day
that the latter had in the meantime executed a deed of sale of the en-
tire zamindari in favour of his mother Rani Bishnukumari. When the
sale was formally approved, the Raja was released after a weeks im-
prisonment.

The dowagers term of zamindari began inauspiciously with a
mortgage. Within two months of the transfer of the estate she applied
to the Collector for leave to mortgage her entire property to Joseph
Barretto of Sooksagar against a loan of six lakhs of rupees, with which
she proposed to clear up the revenue arrears which had devolved on her
when the zamindari changed hands (p. 1 09). Reinstated in May 1795,
she faced the same kind of resistance on the part of her principal
farmers, which had been her predecessors headache. In May 1796 the

Introduction to the Burdwan District Records

Collector reported that the mustajirs were withholding payment of
rent exceeding three lakhs. Early next year the Collector again com-
plained that ‘the combination entered into by the farmers & others’
prevented all hope of a speedy realization of the balance of revenue
which had already piled up to the huge total of Rs 6,84,2 1 7 by the time
of the winter instalment. One of the mustajirs, Badan Chand Mitra,
alone owed her over Rs 7 1 ,000, and the Collector was sure that it was
all due to a certain number of people wishing to bring her into dis-
repute with Government by causing her to fall in balance and thereby
have her lands sold for arrears of Revenue’ (pp. 243, 269, 278). Little
did the Collector realize that it required no special conspiracy to dis-
credit the zamindar, for all such difficulties arose from a lack of corres-
pondence between the revenue demands of the Government and the
zamindar s power to enforce the payment of rent.

If, however, there was a conspiracy at all, it must be said to have been
a great success. For as the arrears accumulated into lakhs, the auctioneer s
hammer moved on from pargana to pargana throughout the district.
Within six months from 26 August 1796 to 22 February 1797 alone,
lands paying a net revenue of ahout three lakhs of rupees were ordered
for sale and ten parganas with a total jama of about nine lakhs attached

(pp. 255, 257, 269).*9

There were sales galore. When in 1 797 the balance of revenue reached
the six lakh figure, the Board took it up as a policy to sell off the Rani s
zamindari in lots, each lot consisting of several villages. Many of the
smaller zamindaris like those of Chitua, Raipur, and Satsika were also
subjected to sale, and were altogether liquidated in the process. The
Burdwan Raj succeeded in avoiding such a fate because, for one thing,
it possessed resources large enough to resist complete effacement, and
secondly because RajaTejchand had made it a point to purchase benami
very large portions of his mother s estates. After her death, when the
zamindari reverted to him, he could therefore start afresh with the
greater part of his property still intact.

The correspondence and enclosures in this volume make it amply
clear that the sale of lands in the period after 1793 surpassed all pre-
vious record both in amount and frequency. This by itself proves how

49 Also vide appendix I, nos. 64, 80, 81, and 85.

66 The Small Voice of History

unrealistic had been the claim made on behalf of the Permanent Set-
tlement as an excellent guarantee of the security of property. One
might, indeed, throw back the argument by saying that in Burdwan,
as elsewhere in Bengal, the Permanent Settlement, at the initial stage,
was itself the cause of a great flux: it succeeded in creating a new pattern
of proprietorship only at the cost of the old and traditional one. It
should be noted, however, that the transformation took place within
the existing framework. Estates changed hands from one group of
zamindars to another. Thus the principal purchasers of the lands of the
Rani of Burdwan were Dwarka Nath Sinha of Singur, Chhaku Sinha
of Bhastura, the Mukherjis of Janai, and the Banerjis ofTelinipara. As
the Burdwan District Gazetteer says, the dismemberment of the
Burdwan Raj estate laid the foundations of the landed aristocracy of
Burdwan and Hooghli.50 In other words, the brisk and sweeping sale
of lands in the early years of the Permanent Settlement did nothing to
cause a transfer of property from one class to another, as was often the
case in later times, for instance during the famine of 1943. On the
contrary, this acted as a rationalizing process which gave landed pro-
perty a wider base than ever before by a more ample distribution within
the class itself and by absorbing in land a certain amount of capital
which might otherwise have flown into non-agrarian channels. Here
at least Lord Cornwallis proved a just prophet.

No normal and healthy development of agriculture was possible in
this atmosphere of tension arising from the pressure of the Company s
revenue demands. Apart from the fact that the incidence fell in the last
analysis on the primary producer, the very primary conditions of
production, irrigation, and embankment were seriously affected.

Agriculture in the central and western parts of Burdwan largely
depended on irrigation by tanks. The existence of numerous old and
decaying tanks throughout the district even today bears testimony to
the fact that in ancient times the public authorities attached great
importance to this form of irrigation. The need was so keenly felt that
the excavation of a tank was universally recognized as a deed of piety
and was often associated with religious ceremonies. It was also custom-
ary to regard land used for digging tanks as rent-free. The Company's
design to subject this useful branch of public utility service to demands

50 Burdwan District Gazetteer , p. 98.

Introduction to the Burdwan District Records 67

of revenue was, therefore, regarded as an unprecedented violation of
traditional rights. The order, when published, put an entire stop to the
making of tanks’, and the Collector reported that people would rather
pay ten years’ purchase money for land used for excavation than ‘con-
sent to take out Pottahs to pay rent for it either for the decennial term
or in perpetuity’ (p. 88).

What mattered more for agriculture as a whole was the serious
neglect of embankment works, commonly known as pulbandi. Visiting
Bengal exactly a century before the British conquest, Bernier had
noted and admired the excellent system of overflow irrigation which
consisted in an endless number of canals, cut in bygone ages from the
Ganges by immense labour, for navigation and irrigation.’ Burdwan
had her own natural channel of irrigation in the Damodar, and as
Willcocks observes in his famous treatise, in the eighteenth century
‘though the Mahratta-Afghan wars had thoroughly disorganized the
more difficult irrigation on the Ganges, the easier irrigation on the
Damodar had held its own.’31 Within three decades of Plassey, how-
ever, the progressive decay of irrigation of which Colebrooke spoke
was working havoc in Burdwan by exposing the district to the scourge
of annual floods almost without respite. The reference to four floods
in a period of twelve years covered by these records may be taken as an
index of the frequency and seriousness of the calamity as it hit the
district, especially in its lower parganas.

In a letter dated 31 May 1793 the Acting Collector W.A. Biooke
explained that the recurrence of flood was due to the accumulation of
silt completely blocking up the mouth of the old channel of the river
which used to divert ‘so great a body of water and weight of the current
which took a southerly direction and presented the destructive effects
which in later years have been experienced in Mundulghaut & the
lower Pergunnah’ (p. 47). His suggestion was to clear up the passage
by excavating the mouth of the old Damodar. His successor Samuel
Davis very strongly differed with him and argued at length to prove
how such a project would be of no use (pp. 85-6). The idea seems to
have been dropped there once and for all, and the only preoccupation
of the authorities in the last quarter of the eighteenth century was to
devise ways of stopping up the breaches in the so-called zamindari

51 Willcocks, Ancient System of Irrigation in Bengal , p. 20.

68 The Small Voice of History

banks. This, according to Willcocks, was ‘the final blow* which defi-
nitely killed overflow irrigation in Bengal’. The traditional system in
Bengal, which consisted of an interdependent network of dams and
overflow canals, was meant to combine the double purpose of protection
against flood and irrigation by the rich silt-bearing flood water itself.
The English rulers of the country, however, missed the point altogether:
they exclusively emphasized the protective aspect and were obsessed
with the numerous breaches which occurred every year in the embank-
ments. Little did they understand that many of these breaches actually
served as safety valves conducting the accumulated pressure of a rising
flood into the overflow canals. Irrigation still went on, however’, says
Willcocks,

because the zemindars and tenants made secret breaches in the banks
and irrigated their lands when they could. These breaches were consi-
dered by the authorities as breaches made by the uncontrolled floods
of the rivers, and the Government set itself to put an end to such dis-
creditable occurrings. It never seems to have struck anybody that the
breaches were made secretly by the peasantry for irrigation. And yet it
ought to have been evident that 40 or 50 breaches in a heavily em-
banked river of inconsiderable length in a single year could not pos-
sibly have been made by the river itself; for one or two breaches eased
the situation.52

Willcocks’s analysis of the causes of the ruin of the ancient system of
irrigation is thus limited to purely technical considerations, to the
fact that ‘the early English who were traders and sailors knew noth-
ing about irrigation . This, however, goes only halfway to explain the
problem, which fundamentally arose out of a serious maladjustment
of social responsibilities resulting from the East India Company’s reve-
nue policy.

The phrase zamindari embankment’, which occurs in numerous
records of this period, is an evidence of the fact that the old zamindari
system was committed to the charge of irrigation works. The fiscal
demands of the government on the zamindar were moderate enough
to permit him to appropriate for himself the surplus resulting from

52 Ibid., pp. 22-3.

Introduction to the Burdwan District Records 69

every increase in production. This is what actually made the zamindars
compete with one another to increase tillage by offering easy terms to
paikausht ryots. Their concern about the improvement of irrigation
and embankment also arose from the same incentive and in course of
time assumed the importance of an almost inviolable social responsi-
bility.

This traditional correspondence between profit and responsibility
was, however, most seriously disturbed as the Company began to
demand an increasing share of the fund s surplus as its revenue. The
loose and easygoing relationship between the zamindars and the ruling
power of former times was replaced now by a strict cash nexus. The
Company’s policy of granting the zamindar a deduction from the jama
on account of pulbandi was in fact the businessman s way of measuring
out a matter ofvery serious social responsibility in terms of his balance-
sheet. And since the administration paid the money, it had a right to
see how it was spent. Hence arose the cumbrous and unintelligent
system of dual control over irrigation works under early British rule,
when the Company insisted on the appointment of a European
superintendent to ensure the proper utilization of pulbandi grants by
the zamindar. There is much in the records presented here to indicate
that this dichotomy helped still further to upset the already disturbed
socio-economic equilibrium of the old Bengali village, for it affected
what was the most vital prerequisite of agricultural production.

At the time of the Permanent Settlement the embankments of
Burdwan, especially in Mandalghat pargana, were in a precarious state.
The Collector had to remind the Board that care for pulbandi was a
matter of common interest for the Government and the ryots, and that
the administration would be guilty of a breach of public faith if the
policy of neglect continued. In his letters dated 9 October 1793 and
1 February 1794 he stated that the amount granted for pulbandi fell
far short of what the ryots paid on this account as abwab , which was
consolidated in the jama. In other words, the Government appropriated
for itself a part of the public contribution towards the maintenance of
irrigation works (pp. 82, 99, 100).

Rani Bishnukumari, on assuming charge of the zamindari, took a
firm stand by demanding the immediate removal of the pulbandi
contractor, Mr Foxcroft. In a petition received by the Board in 1794

The Small Voice of History

she wrote: ‘It is said that Mr. Foxcroft who got the Poolbundy contract
in Maha Raja Deraj Teije Chund Behadur s time, has applied for the
renewal of it. From this report, the inhabitants & Ryotts have formed
an intention of leaving their native homes. The inundation which have
happened here are all entirely owing to Mr. Foxcroft . . . If the contract
is renewed to him the country will be uncultivated and go to ruin.’53
In 1796 the Collector reported that the Rani in her exasperation had
stopped paying for pulbandi altogether. The Collector after a tour of
several parganas confirmed the Rani s complaint about the neglect of
repairs. The Rani wished that the Board should enquire if the pulbandi
funds had not been misappropriated by Mr Foxcroft. She received the
Collector’s support for her proposal to take over the charge of pulbandi
herself. Accordingly, J. Thompson was appointed pulbandi officer un-
der the Rani, and the Collector was sure that this arrangement would
work (pp. 228-9, 235).

Before the year was out, it was clear that the Collector had been too
optimistic. In January 1797 the Board of Revenue wrote to the Col-
lector asking him to take over the charge of pulbandi from the Rani s
hands if she continued to neglect the works. Later on, however, the
order seems to have been modified to mean that the Collector ought
to intervene only where necessary. The Board were possibly inspired
by a commendable sense of respect for the zamindar s authority, but in
practice this amounted to vacillation considerably limiting the exercise
of the district officer s authority. The Rani did nothing to improve
matters. There was a report of severe damage to embankments in
several parganas, and the Collector was not sure if the Rani had made
good use of the pulbandi allowance. Thus, ironically enough, the Rani
herself was now accused of inefficiency and misappropriation very
much in the same way as Foxcroft had been accused by her a year
ago. The same Mr Ireland, Collector, who had been until recendy her
enthusiastiesupporter in matters concerning pulbandi, now denounced
her to the Board (pp. 286, 299, 304-5). 54

There was no improvement in the situation when after the death
of the Rani the zamindari reverted to RajaTejchand. An enquiry held

53 51/?, p.335.

54 Ibid., p. 583.

Introduction to the Burdwan District Records

in the summer of 1799 revealed that officers (darogas) appointed at
various sites to conduct the repairs were mostly people who had no
experience whatsoever of this kind of work, and that in many cases the
works suffered for lack of manpower, as the officers would not issue the
full amount of funds allocated for this purpose. In spite of this report,
however, the Collector reftised to dismiss the inefficient darogas, for
according to him experience mattered little. The appointment of a
new superintendent, J.E. Bateman, brought no relief, and the new offi-
cer was in his turn subjected to censure by the Collector. The very last
letters on this subject in the present volume speak of the failure of
the embankments at Bhursut, of the wastage of money over flimsy re-
pairs, and of damages in Mandalghat (pp. 355-61, 374, 380-1, 387,
395-6, 405-8).

Thus there was no getting out of the vicious circle. The Government
refused to take over the charge of pulbandi entirely in its own hands,
while the trustees, the zamindars, encumbered as they were with the
constant accumulation of revenue arrears, did little to carry out what
they once regarded as a duty sanctified by tradition. No adjustment
within the framework of this division of authority over irrigation
works could prove satisfactory. Over and above what was allocated on
account ofpulbandi, the Government involved itself in heavy additional
expenditure as the Collector moved from pargana to pargana repairing
breaches. Corruption was rampant, not only among men like Foxcroft
and the darogas, but even among more responsible officials. Robert
Ireland, Collector, was himself posthumously suspected of misappro-
priation of pulbandi funds (pp. 374, 380-1). The threat of inunda-
tion hung over the district every year when the rivers rose in spate. The
reader has only to turn to the many anxious letters and petitions from
ryots, weavers, and grain dealers to realize how insecure were the con-
ditions of agricultural production in areas exposed to flood.

Burdwaris industrial reputation — deterrents to trade — sayer collections —
Police Tax — lack of roads — the meaning of the Company's monopoly —
main commercial centres — volume oftransactions calculated — conditions
of cotton and mulberry cultivation and textile manufacture — obstacles to
trade — inadequacies of the Company's Regulations .

The Small Voice of History

Throughout the eighteenth century Burdwan was one of the most
prosperous commercial districts of Bengal. Ramprasad Sens descrip-
tion of the bazar at Burdwan in Vidyasundar is probably no exaggerated
picture of its affluence in the middle of the century. Among the goods
put out for sale the poet mentions a long list of textiles. Holwell also
speaks of at least fifteen sorts of cotton fabrics manufactured at vari-
ous centres within the zamindari of Raja Tilakchand.55 The industry
of Burdwan, like that of the other western districts, was considerably
affected by the Maratha raids, and there is much in the Bengal letters
to the Court of Directors as well as in Holwell to indicate that many
weavers and artisans deserted the aurangs in the disturbed areas to go
over to eastern Bengal. In spite of this, however, Burdwan maintain-
ed her lead in manufacture, with the only difference that by the last
quarter of the century it was, on the whole, subjected to the East India
Company’s monopoly. In the period covered by the correspondence
here we find in existence two parallel sectors of trade in Burdwan —
European and indigenous. While the former exercised an exclusive
right of business over a wide range of goods from cotton and silk to salt
and saltpetre, the latter was limited to trade in grains, mostly rice. In
other words, industries requiring a relatively more advanced form of
investment and enterprise were put out of reach of the natives, who
were strictly confined to that particular branch of trade which depended
most on agriculture.

Even then, indigenous trade suffered from serious limitations. In
the first place, it was hampered by saycr collections which still continu-
ed in spite of prohibitory orders and regulations. River-borne commerce
was in particular affected by the collection of tolls, known as sayer
chalanta , at th z ghats zndganjes. In May 1786 the Raja demanded that
he should be allowed either the deduction (of Rs 82,868 from his jama
on account of the abolition of sayer chalanta) or authority to collect
the duties — notwithstanding the Rowannahs.’56 This was of course
refused. In October 1786 the Board received from Robert Pott, cus-
toms collector at Murshidabad, a revealing report which very dearly
shows how feudal greed combined with administrative inefficiency to

55 Holwell, op. cit., pp. 195-6*

56 BOR, 7 June 1786.

Introduction to the Burdwan District Records

uphold the hampering restrictions on inland trade. Mr Pott wrote:
‘Colly Persaud Chatterghee a Gaut Mangec whom I secured at Palleah
in the very act of demanding money from one of my Boats, insists on
it that his collections are legal and authorized, for that he rents them
of Gunganarain Metric Sadder Ijeradar of Burdwan at the annual
sum of 1 100 Sicca Rupees. He had two Sepoys with him who used
to assist him in his illegal collection tho’ placed there by Mr. Kinlock
for the express purpose of protecting the Merchants.’57 Soon after this
the Board published a Proclamation (November 1786) authorizing
Collectors to inflict corporal punishment on those found guilty of
exacting illegal duties like rahadari and chalanta, and to confiscate a
part or even the whole of the estate of a zamindar within whose
jurisdiction the offence was committed. But even this did not put a
stop to the abuse, for the zamindars, pressed hard by the Government’s
revenue demands, could not do without such illegal gratification. The
case of Nandakumar Roy of Stuart Ganj, as reported by the Collector
on 30 August 1799, actually illustrates how the grant of sayer rights
together with rent-free lands often amounted to an evasion of law
(p. 391).

Another factor hampering the trade and manufacture of the district
was the levy of a Police Tax ‘upon the merchants, traders and shop-
keepers’. The revenue collected on this account was to pay for the
expenses of the police establishment in the district. The Regulation,
imposing the tax on the whole province, was announced in a circular
dated 7 December 1792, which contained the following strange
justification: ‘His Lordship in Council is of opinion that this expence
may with equity be charged upon the above descriptions of people, as
from having constant occasion to transport their property from one
part of the country to another they are more immediately interested
in the establishment of an efficient Police, and as by the late general
abolition of the Sayer collections they carry on their trade free of
duty, and pay no immediate tax whatever to the state.’58 Thus, what the
Government gave away with one hand, it grasped with the other.
Although the revenue from Police Tax fell far short of what the Raja

57 Ibid., 28 November 1786.

58 Colebrooke, Digest , Supplement, p. 478.

The Small Voice of History

had claimed as due to him on account of sayer,59 the harm it did to
industry was not negligible. For the district officers, in order to in-
crease the amount of receipts on this head, insisted on extending the
area of taxability to include not merely bona fide traders, merchants,
and shopkeepers, but also artisans and manufacturers of all kinds.
The weavers were the hardest hit. Many of them who worked for the
Company’s investment received advances in grain and not in money,
but the moment they took it out for sale at a marketplace they would
be, according to the Collectors interpretation, liable to taxation as
dealers in grain. Unfortunately, however, this rather expansive view
of the Regulation was upheld both by the Board and the Council.
Consequently, in the five years that the Regulation was in force (it was
rescinded in 1797) the weavers of Burdwan were put to great distress.
For although the tax was supposed to be quite moderate, there was no
standard of assessment worked out by the Government for the guid-
ance of its officers. Only the co-operation of responsible local men
could have, under such circumstances, ensured a somewhat fair assess-
ment. But this co-operation was not forthcoming, and in March 1794
the Collector was obliged to appoint Tahsildars as collectors of Police
Tax, ‘it being impossible to prevail on any of the principal inhabitants
to undertake the collection of the Tax’ (p. 108). Abuses in assessment
and collection were, therefore, not infrequent, and many weavers who
refused to pay the tax on the loom’ were sent to jail for extremely petty
demands, which in many cases did not exceed a few annas. In fact,
imprisonment was considered by the Collector as the most effective
method of correcting defaulters. The Government had asked objectors
to pay up first and then seek redress at a court of law. So while resistance
to payment was punished by imprisonment, the adalat was embarras-
sed with an enormous amount of litigation.

The result was that apart from the hardship caused to the weavers,
the tax undermined the Company’s investment itself, for many of
them were working on contract for the Company’s factories. It is a fine
study in the inner contradictions of a bureaucracy to see how in many
of those letters the Commercial Residents assume the role of defend-
ers of the rights of the oppressed weavers against the tyranny of the
Collector and his peons. As in the case of land revenue, here also the

59 Police Tax collected in 1 794-5 amounted to Rs 13,317, BLR , p. 410.

Introduction to the Burdwan District Records 75

fiscal policy of the Company almost defeated its own purpose by im-
moderate demands.60

The lack of roads suited to vehicular traffic added a further im-
pediment to the development of commerce. The ancient highways of
Burdwan were already in a state of ruin by the end of the eighteenth
century, and nothing had yet been done by the English either to restore
the old roads or to build new ones, except to engage Captain Rankin
for the construction of a new military road. There were only two roads,
Rankin s road being one of them, which could bear any wheeled traffic
at all. But these merely traversed the district from end to end as they
passed from Calcutta to the upper provinces. The roads forming the
inner network of traffic within the district itself and connecting its
principal town with the big highways and the neighbouring district,
were mostly unsuitable for carriages. For cart-wheels in Bengal, unlike
those used by the Santals who, as Hunter says, know how to make them
out of whole logs, were ‘ill suited for any but the best roads’.61 In a let-
ter dated 28 March 1795 the Collector, Samuel Davis, deplored that
much too little was being done by the Government to improve road
works in a district from which they derived huge profits. This, accord-
ing to him, constituted a violation of what had been a time-honoured
custom under the native administration in the old days. ‘This District’,
he wrote,

yields annually to Government more than 50 Lacks of Sicca Rupees or
more than half a million sterling but I believe the only road repairable
in it at the public expence is the new military road. The other roads are,
I am informed, never repaired except to a very short distance round
the town of Burdwan by the convicts. If a very small portion of the
above-mentioned sum were faithfully and judiciously applied in
mending roads and building bridges or if the same objects could be any
otherwise obtained it would unquestionably contributed [sic] to the
removal of great inconvenience which the natives are subject to at
present for want of the means of easy communication. There are vesti-
ges in the District of roads, bridges and trees which are said to have
been raised, built and planted at the public expence for the convenience
and comfort of the native inhabitants but their present ruined state

60 BLR, pp. 308-9, 424, 488-93.

61 Colebrooke, Remarks , para. 44n.

The Small Voice of History

evinces that their origin must be referred to a period somewhat remote

and probably to the native Government, (p. 192)

The want of roads made the internal market of the district almost
inaccessible to traders from other provinces. The heoparis from Bihar,
for instance, would come all the way from Ramgar to Bishnupur with
large convoys, only to proceed in general to Chanderconah rather than
travel over ridges of ricefields to Burdwan.’ Most traders of Burdwan,
on the other hand, were unwilling to travel beyond the district with
their goods in view of the enormous expence of a land conveyance*.
For it required as much as four to five months to transport fifty thou-
sand maunds of rice across a distance of 360 miles from Burdwan to
Ramgar, and transported by a convoy of no less than fifteen to twenty
thousand bullocks this would, at the existing monthly rate of hire of
one rupee per bullock, cost no less than Rs 60,000 to Rs 80,000, 62 not
counting the cost of fodder. Now, considering that the average price
of rice was about two maunds per rupee as it sold at Burdwan, the
mere cost of transport would increase this by over 200 per cent when
it reached the market at the other end. Since grain was the most
important exportable commodity in which the natives of the district
had a right to trade, it is easy to see how local enterprise was in this
respect smothered by sheer physical difficulties of transport and com-
munication. The difficulty applied not merely to the export trade, but
also to mercantile traffic within the district. We have here on record
several statements by Collectors to die effect that land transport sent
up the prices in every case, so that very often the procurement of grains
for the Government had to wait until the rainy season which created
the conditions for relatively cheaper conveyance by water, although
the roads were made still worse for traffic.

62 The calculation is based on the rates stated in the Collectors letter of
26 November 1795, concerning transport of Midnapur: ‘for every maund of
60 Sa. Wt. one Sicca Rupee per month hire, the burden that the bullocks of this
District carry in general is from 2 Vi to 3 maunds each/ Even allowing a 50 per
cent reduction of these rates which, in this case, were offered for transport re-
quired by the army, the costs remain quite high. Note that the carrying capa-
city of bullocks as stated here falls far short of Colebrooke s estimate for the
upcountry beasts of burden. Colebrooke, Remarks , p. 214.

Introduction to the Burdwan District Records

The single biggest factor which deterred the development of indi-
genous enterprise was the East India Company’s monopoly over a big
sector of manufacture and trade. The predatory methods used by the
early English traders to establish this monopoly are well known. What
differentiated the epoch of tolls from the period under review was
merely the fact that by the middle 1780s the Company had already
succeeded in either expelling from the districts altogether or bringing
under its direct control the numerous adventurers of European origin
whom the Government had for a long time regarded as unwelcome
partners in the internal trade of the country. There are several letters
in this volume to show how the Government followed a very cauti-
ous policy about issuing licences for commerce and manufacture to
European applicants. In Burdwan, as in other districts, therefore, by
the time of the Decennial Settlement, the Company by its policy of
investment had already established a very close grip over some of the
most important items of native industry like cotton textiles, silk, lac,
etc. A powerful network of factories grouped around eight major cen-
tres, each under a Commercial Resident, had been built up throughout
the district, which at this time included parts of modern Midnapur,
Howrah, Hooghly, Birbhum, Bishnupur, and Nadia districts. Hunt-
er s account of the great authority enjoyed by the Commercial Resi-
dents of Birbhum applies to Burdwan also, and in fact the redoubtable
Mr John Cheap, Resident at Soorul and Sonamukhi, appears frequently
in this volume upholding his autonomous rights against encroachment
by the Collector. The figures abstracted in the following table from
data mentioned in Appendix III of this volume give quite a convinc-
ing picture of the financial importance of these transactions and their
distribution by centres (see Table 2). The total volume of investment
worth Rs 76,38,085, including factory charges, was handled in a
period of eighty months between 1789 and 1800, that is, a monthly
average of slightly less than a lakh of rupees. This would put the dis-
tribution of the Company’s income from the Burdwan district at a
ratio of 1:3 as between the sectors of commerce and land revenue.

Cotton textiles and silk, both in the raw state as well as in the form
of piece-goods made up the greater part of the Company’s invest-
ment in Burdwan. As evident from Table 2, it was the richest cen-
tre of cotton and silk manufactures to which was issued the highest

Table 2

<->

O 8

8 jg

oo -C

-r u

oo 5

3 M

O U-c

0 0^0

cm o o

^oianoo^cnn^

t- I oxixrooorHHj-^x

or^ir\i^--Ncr^v^ir\ v/’n
ooornr^xt-CN — oooo
cr> <■<’'> ^-i i— X rrj O OO O

— o U^« oc '■'3"

— O CN C\ O

»T\ OO ^ OO

r<^ — m xr
I--, oo r-- o

OOCNOmOOO

OOOIA(NOOC\N(N

oo o o v\ o

^r^CNoocNkTNxroo

rSooCNOO'^r*— VDu~s
^pnrn,pn^HrOOVOVO
<■0 — ^ rsf O* N N

O N vs (S o ^ fO M ff)

zi ” 2 s" N* N" ^ ^

§> o 8. & J ! *

■f s S 11 i B

S c2 J J J £

Introduction to the Burdwan District Records 79

amounts of credit. But the appropriation of these branches of the
native industry could not be achieved without sharpening still further
the contradiction between the traditional system of production as it
existed then in Bengal and the alien system introduced by the East
India Company.

The manufacture of cotton and silk in Bengal had been for ages
allied with agriculture, and was, like agriculture itself, subject to much
feudal restriction. Cotton and mulberry growers held land from the
zamindars and farmers in the same way as did the other ryots and,
no less than other sections of the peasantry, they too were oppressed
by rack-renting and exactions. Thus we have on record the case of a
mulberry ryot held in illegal detention by the gomastah of Iswari-
pur.63 Then there was a grave report of torture of two of the principal
mulberry ryots dependent on the factory at Radhanagar. This hap-
pened within the estate of Nasiram Sarkar, a farmer of Chitua, who was
notorious in this part of the country for his cruelties and oppressions,
of which the once flourishing Pergunnahs of Burda and Chettooah
and part of Mundulgaut bear melancholy testimony/ It appears from
the Commercial Residents letter that the two ryots, unable longer
to bear the oppressions of the Sheikdar, made so bold as to com-
plain about it to the English authorities. In retaliation they were seized
by the farmers agents, detained in the cutcherry and tortured. The
following extract from the Resident s letter contains a typical instance
of the medieval barbarity to which the ryots of Bengal were often
subjected under the zamindari penal code at the end of eighteenth
century: ‘they have been twice tied to split bamboos and severely
beaten, they have been now sixteen days confined at the Cutcherry of
the Sheikdars, and not contented with their actual confinement, he has
added four Peons as Guards who have already taken fifteen Rupees
which is considerably more than they are authorized to exact even
in a right cause/64 The production of commercial crops could not
flourish under such conditions, and in 1 789 the Collector of Burdwan
sent up to the Board an alarming report about the decrease in mulberry
cultivation. ‘One principal cause of this decrease*, he wrote, ‘has been

63 BLR p. 28.

64 Ibid., p. 61.

80 The Small Voice of History

owing to the very exorbitant rent demanded by the farmer for the
Mulberry lands some of which I am well assured pay so high as 1 4, 1 6
or even 18 Rs. per Begah.’

The manufacture of cotton textiles also suffered from numerous
feudal restrictions. The Collectors report dated 1 June 1789 on the
state of cotton cultivation and manufacture in Burdwan mentions the
existence of tolls, in cash and in kind, imposed on the sale of raw cotton
in the village markets (‘that which is carried to market pays a Haut
Duty of 1 anna 2 Gundas 2 Couries on every Tungy of Copauss, each
Tungy weighing 4 maunds and Kyally Mootey of 1 seer and 1 pow of
Copauss’). While such minor levies were considered by local officials
as too innocuous to merit a formal prohibition, there were others of
more serious denomination which continued to be collected in de-
fiance of orders banning them. The most important of these was the
so-called suti mahal which the Collector, J. Kinlock, defined in his
letter of 9 April 1 788 as ‘duties collected on thread or on cloths manu-
factured at the aurungs throughout the district.’ The total collection
on this head amounted annually to Rs 36,428 for the entire district.
There existed in Burdwan at this time five suti mahal estates, each held
by an under-farmer ( Katkinadar ) who, on payment of a fixed amount
as rent to his principal, was authorized ‘to collect duties on cloths
and thread exported into or imported from the Aurungs.’ The case of
Pratapnarain Ghose, Katkinadar of Autpur, accused of collecting suti
mahal duties, made it quite clear to the Board of Revenue that the regu-
lations prohibiting rahadari and sayer chalanta had by no means freed
indigenous industry and trade from every kind of feudal exaction.65

The efforts made by the Company’s Government to correct these
abuses were at best half-hearted. The Committee of Circuit by its
resolution of 25 August 1772 had sought to encourage mulberry
plantation by declaring that waste or uncultivated land brought into
tillage for this purpose should pay little or no rent for the first five years.
But this attempt to solve the crisis of sericulture by an extension of
tillage was bound to fail, as it did nothing to remove the basic evil of
rack-renting from which the mulberry ryots suffered. In fact, the
resolution would not even recognize this as a deterrent, ‘because’, it

65 BOR, 24 June 1788.

Introduction to the Burdwan District Records 8 1

said, ‘this is a cause which has always existed.’ What the Committee did
not understand was the simple fact that rack-renting under conditions
of the East India Company’s policy of investment was an altogether
different matter from the traditional extortions to which the ryots had
always been subjected under the old zamindari system. Naturally,
therefore, by the time of the Decennial Settlement rack-renting reap-
peared as the most important factor of the deterioration of sericulture.
But the Cornwallis administration did even less than the Govern-
ment of Warren Hastings to introduce reforms. The Councils letter of
26 January 1788, addressed to the Board of Revenue, spoke only in
general terms about the need to encourage cultivation of mulberry, and
without giving this pious wish any support in an act of law instructed
the Board to seek the zam i ndars’ co-operation to improve the conditions
of mulberry ryots.66

The Regulation on weavers, framed by the Board ofTrade in 1 786,
went further than this.67 But here also the proposed measuie of im-
provement was administered strictly according to the commercial re-
quirements of the Company. The Regulation provided for a number
of legal safeguards favourable to the Company’s weavers, but these
represented no more than what was barely needed to ensure the regular
and timely execution of contracts for investment. While the parochial
labour of the textile producers of Bengal, thanks to the Company’s
transactions, was being converted into an element of world economy,
nothing was done to introduce a corresponding measure of im-
provement either in the technique or in the relations of production.
The demands of a higher economic order were thus superimposed on
a backward industrial organization without preparing the latter in any
sense for such a function. There was nothing either in the nature of
the East India Company or in Bengali society at the time which could
satisfy the historical requirements of the situation. The result was
that the Company, failing as it did to effect the release of the product-
ive forces of native industry from feudal fetters, adopted the more
facile solution of quarantine by isolating a part of the productive
system from its original habitat and straitjacketing it by the artificial

66 BLR p. 65.

67 BOR , 5 September 1786.

The Small Voice of History

organization of the English factories- Thus, even before the indigenous
industry of Bengal had begun to wilt under the blasts that blew from
Manchester in the first half of the nineteenth century, it was undermined
at its very base due to the utter incompatibility between its mode of
production and the nature of the market it was intended to serve:

Report on an Investigation of the
Gauripur Raj Estate Archives

IThe archives of the Gauripur Raj Estate contain several hund-
red documents in Persian, Bengali, and English. The earliest
• of these is dated 1 606, and there is enough material preserved
here in a fairly satisfactory condition, thanks to the late Raja Pravat-
chandra Baruas solicitude for historical records, to permit the recons-
truction of the history of this important frontier region for a period
of over three hundred years. To describe this collection as mere fami-
ly records would be misleading, because the documents relate not
merely to the Gauripur zamindars, traditionally known as the Baruas
of Rangamati, but to developments in the whole of that vast, uncer-
tain, troublesome tract, covering the districts of Kamrup, Goalpara,
Coochbehar, and Rangpur, which has always been the problem area
for all governments, both past and present. The late Sri Nagendra
Nath Vasus researches have proved the importance of this area for the
social history of the two provinces which meet on this frontier. The fact
that Rangamati was for a time the very base of the political and military
administration of the Mughals in north-eastern Bengal and that these
districts were the principal scene of the wars between the Mughals and
the Ahoms, make this region very important for late medieval history.
The longstanding association of the Baruas with the royal family of
Coochbehar makes these documents significant as a source of infor-
mation about the confused politics of that state in the eighteenth

Copyright © 1956 Ranajit Guha. First published in Report of the Regio-
nal Records Survey Committee for West Bengal 1955-56 (Calcutta: 1956),
pp. 21-30.

The Small Voice of History

century. Many of the Gauripur papers speak of the deeds of the famous
Boolchand Barua. The English records include numerous statements
and accounts showing the details of the early revenue administration
of the East India Company in these districts. There are some authen-
tic copies of letters issued and received by the Collector of Rangpur
which add much to our knowledge about the decennial settlement in
Goalpara. The Bengali documents, the earliest of which is dated 1 637,
are mostly Sanads , Kabuliyats , and Seyhas which throw much light on
the distribution of rent-free lands among the various ancillary branches
of the family of Kanungos. Much older than even the earliest specimens
collected in Dr S.N. Sen’s Prachin Bangala Patra Sankalan , these letters
are of interest not merely for their archaic calligraphy and linguistic
peculiarities but also as an evidence of the last-ditch resistance put up
by our culture in this remote corner of the province against the ruling
languages, Persian and English. In order, however, to avoid prolixity
we shall confine this report to a discussion of the Persian records only.

2. Documents in Persian 1 including sanads, parwanas, and accounts,
constitute a considerable part of these archives. Altogether they cover
a period of over two hundred years from the accession of Jahangir to
the first quarter of the nineteenth century when Goalpara was separated
from Rangpur. With the help of the data furnished by these papers it
is possible to prepare a fairly accurate list of succession to the impor-
tant Kanungoship of Rangamati. The only existing work in this field,
the late Sri Nagendranath Vasu s chapter on the Gauripur Raj in his
Social History ofKamarupa (vol. II, pp. 1 53-80), is unfortunately too
much influenced by a certain caste outlook to merit recognition as
sound history, although his researches in family chronicles help much
in interpreting the documentary evidence furnished by the Gauri-
pur papers.

3. The earliest document in this collection is a sanad dated 1606,
investing Kavindra Patra (alias Baninath) with the office of Naib

1 The late Raja Pravatchandra Barua had secured rhe translation of the more
important Persian documents, some seventy in number, by the Persian translators
of the Calcutta High Court. These arc still regarded as authorised translations,
and many legal disputes have in all these years been decided on their strength.
The extracts quoted in this section of the report are all taken from these trans-
lations.

Report on an Investigation of the Gauripur Raj Estate

Kanungo of thanah Rangamati. Kavindra Patra, scholar2 and statesman,
founder of the fortunes of the Gauripur Raj family, served as minister
under three successive kings of Coochbehar for over fifty years. He was
appointed by Raja Parikshitnarayan as his personal representative at
the imperial court, and was on the death of his master nominated to
the Kanungoship of Rangamati. The sanad conferring this office on
Kavindra Patra states:

The ablest of his contemporaries Bani Nath should know that the post
of Naib Kanoongo of thanah Rangamati, Sarkar Dhekri, has been con-
ferred upon him by His Highness from the time of the death of Bishan
Chand. It is required that he should satisfactorily discharge the duties
entrusted to him. He should try his best to look to the saving of the
Government and thus prove the faithful discharge of his duties. He
should keep the papers of that place in due form and furnish the Im-
perial Office with such of them as might be called for. Know this to be
peremptory. Dated the 26th Maharram 2nd year of the reign of His
Imperial Majesty.

The Kanungoship thus conferred continued to be held by members of
this family during a period of more than 1 50 years covered by eight
successive generations without a break. Here is still another instance
showing how under the Mughals administrative offices often assumed
a hereditary character by custom though not by right.

4. T here is much evidence in these documents illustrating still an-
other important characteristic of Mughal times, that is, the tendency
of an increasing accumulation of property in land to the credit of fami-
lies connected with the highest offices in the state. The Kanungoship
of Rangamati, conferred on Kavindra Patra, was expanded in course
of time to cover a vast territory between Rangpur and Gauhati which
included the four Sarkars of Kamrup, Dhekri , Dakshinkul, and Bangal-
bhum. As the sanads very clearly state, the Kanungos enjoyed a large
quantity of rent-free lands as commission — as nankar and dastur. This

2 A manuscript, considered by some scholars to be a very old copy of Kavin-
dra Patras translation of the Mahabharata , is still preserved in the library of the
late Raja Pravatchandra Barua. For controversies about the authenticity of
this work, see Introduction to Kavindra-birachitaAshtadas-parvaMahabharat ,
edited and published by Gaurinath Shastri of Dhubri.

The Small Voice of History

form of emolument was considered important enough to secure for a
Kanungo all the support of the administration against refractory zamin-
dars withholding the amount of dastur legally due to him. There are
two documents dated 1654 and 1683 showing how the Government
actually intervened in favour of Kanungos Kaviratna and Deviprasad
in disputes of this nature. We have even more impressive evidence than
this of the power of a Kanungos prerogatives. It appears that his pro-
prietory rights were ex jurisdictio . Thus the following extract from a
sanad issued during the term of Deviprasad Kanungo shows how the
latter was authorized to collect taxes and secure forced labour from
ryots even after they had migrated from his nankar estates to a neigh-
bouring pargana.

You Chowdhuris and Patwaris ofToppa Banker should know that the
tenants of Mouzah Dampur, appertaining to the saidToppa are from
a long time, according to Sanads, attached to Deviprasad Kanungo
of Kamrup, in accordance of his Nankar. At present the said tenants
have settled in Parganas Parbatjowar. It is held that even now, as usual,
they are to have connection with the said Kanungo on account of his
Nankar. It is required that you should consider the said tenants as
having connection with the said Kanungo on account of his Nankar
and should have them under his control that he might realize tax and
exact forced labour from them, and should under no circumstances,
object to their being thus treated. Know this to be peremptory. Dated
the 14th Showwal 1086 Hijri.

5. The power thus acquired by the Kanungos as the principal reve-
nue officers in the area and as feudal magnates was most effectively
used by them to secure still further additions to their already extensive
properties. This was achieved by the apparently innocuous method of
securing assignments for members of the Kanungo family to the office
of Chowdhuries in various pans of the province. As in course of time
this office itself became hereditary, many of the local zamindaris
were also absorbed, one after the other, into the family heritage of
the Kanungos of Rangamati. The process which must be as old as
feudalism itself seems, from the evidence of these records, to have
gathered momentum towards the end of the seventeenth century,
when the family had already earned to its credit the experience and
prestige of a hundred years of Kanungoship. And in most cases the

Report on an Investigation of the Gauripur Raj Estate 87

Baruas edged into the zamindaris by physically ousting other established
families. They were of course astute enough to obtain formal sanction
of the Government for all such acts, and some of the documents pre-
served in the Gauripur archives may be regarded as the mute witness
of a sordid drama of dispossession of the weak zamindar by his power-
ful neighbours: Dharmaraj Chowdhuri of Kapsnurma by Gokul
Chandra (1687); Diljit of Noabad-Faturi by Kunjamohan (1701);
Pasupati of Ghurla by Balchandra (1724); Pritram of Ghurla by
Boolchandra (1733); Jugalkishore of Jamira by Prithvidev (1758); and
Ranaram and Umanath respectively of Machpara and Kalumalupara
by Durgaprosad (1766). How the Kanungos must have made very
profitable use of their authority to facilitate such procedure can be
easily imagined when we have on record such facts as that Umanath
was replaced by Durgaprasad as zamindar of Kalumalupara on the
strength of an application by Boolchandra Kanungo, cousin of the
new zamindar,

6. The documents contain some very valuable information con-
cerning several aspects of the all-important office of Kanungoship.
In the first place, it comes out very clearly that the Kanungos with all
the wide powers they enjoyed locally were still subject to the ultimate
authority of the Imperial Government. We have evidence here of at
least one case of dismissal from the office of Kanungoship. In 1731
Tilakchand was removed from his post for ‘having failed to perform
the duties and to pay the Peshkash money*, which amounted to no
more than Rs 248-8 annas annual, but had piled up to a total arrear
of Rs 10,398-8 annas. Considering the distance between Rangamati
and Delhi and the uncertainties of the epoch which so often stimulated
an oudying district s inclination to autonomy, this should be regard-
ed as a convincing proof of the effective authority still exercised by the
centre. Secondly, the case mentioned above seems to be typical of the
very great rigour with which the financial obligations of Kanungo-
ship were enforced. Thus, Rashid Khans sanad conferring the office
on Kaviratna (1662) insisted that the latter should first clear up the
balance due to the Government on account of peshkash amounting
to Rs 5,714 in ilahi coins. Tilakchand was appointed to the post in
1726 after he had agreed to pay off accumulated peshkash arrears of
Rs 9,901-8 annas. And all investiture sanads emphasize the condition
that the administration of the Kanungo must be economical. Otherwise

The Small Voice of History

the highly idealized statement of a Kanungos duties, which occurs in
all sanads, looks too wishfully phrased to be effective. The following
lines quoted from a sanad granted to Devraj in 1 665 may be accepted
as a sample of the invariable pattern:

The said person should by his good treatment keep the tenants and
the general residents of the said Sarkar contented and appropriate
the Dastoor and Nankar charges usually allowed to the Kanungo. He
should duly send the necessary papers to the Imperial Office etc., etc.

How the Kanungos, on their part, responded in an equally formal
string of phrases can be seen in the following extract from Balchand
Baruas muchalka (1732):

I do declare and give in writing that I shall perform the duties of the
said post honestly and faithfully. I shall keep the ryots and residents
contented by my good treatment. I shall not exact from or levy upon
anybody a single farthing more than the fixed fees. I shall furnish the
Imperial Office with Mawazina papers, Dasturul Amals etc. and other
necessary papers in due form under my own signature. I shall not act
disloyally and faithlessly even in the minutest or the most unimportant
matter. I shall deposit in the Imperial Treasury the fixed annual Pcsh-
kash money.

7. The sanads, however, never failed to associate very concrete
emoluments with the highly generalized statements of the Kanungos
duties. The three kinds of emolument mentioned in these papers are
(i) Commission ( dastur ) on the amount of land revenue, collected by
a Kanungo; (ii) Commission (dastur) on account of sayer collections;
and (iii) rent-free {nankar) lands. Two sanads issued to Kavisekhar in
1625 and 1635 mention the rate of the first form of dastur as 2 per cent,
while the second is put at 3l/2 per cent in a sanad of 1684 which states,
‘Deviprasad Kanungo the ablest of his contemporaries reported that
he was allowed his Dastur at the rate of rupees three and annas two per
cent in the Sayer collection of the Parganas of Sarkar Kamrup etc/ The
most important source of a Kanungos profit was of course the nankar
grants assigned to him at the time of his appointment. These hundreds
of acres of rent-free land endowed by the Government placed him, by
the very nature of his office, among the leading landlords of his region.
And since in the case of the Baruas of Rangamati the office continued

Report on an Investigation of the Gauripur Raj Estate

in the family line for the greater part of two centuries without a break,
every succeeding generation of Kanungos added fresh quantities of
nankar lands to a vast rent-free inheritance which thus went on gaining
in size by an almost arithmetical progression.

How exactly this process operated can be realized from the following
simple facts told by these records. A sanad of 1622 states that Kavi-
sekhar, appointed Kanungo that year after the death of his father
Kavindra, was permitted to hold free of rent 4,260 bighas (13 hoot
5 hist) of land hitherto enjoyed by his father as nankar by virtue of his
office. Another sanad dated 1635 informs us that lands granted to
Kavisekhar Kanungo on account of Nankar fees’ amounted to 9,020
bighas (28 koot 3 bisi). There are detailed lists appended to these two
sanads showing the distinction of these properties in parganas and
mouzahs , from which one can clearly see how this nett increase of over
two hundred per cent was achieved by an extension of the Kanungos
proprietorship into the new parganas over an area of 2,390 bighas,
added to the further acquisition of 2,370 bighas in four out of the six
older parganas where the Kanungo had already had some nankar lands
as his inheritance in lt>22. The cumulative result of this process over
a period of nearly two centuries was an immense concentration of rent-
free lands in the hands of the Baruas of Rangamati. The fact that much
of this property lay distributed in moderate lots among many depend-
ent branches of the family all over Goalpara district does not make it
less imposing in any sense, but on the other hand emphasizes the far-
sighted prudence of the Kanungos who had much experience of trans-
action in real estate. How this policy paid its dividend can be well
understood from the bewilderment of the author of the article on
Goalpara in the Imperial Gazetteer. He wonders why the zamindars of
Goalpara with their colossal estates should pay so litde revenue, and
tries to explain it by simply saying that the district was settled after
1793 on the basis of the old rental. But why was the old rental itself out
of proportion with the size of estates? The answer, based on the evid-
ence of sanads cited above, has to be sought in the hereditary nature
of Kanungoship in this district and the continuous accumulation of
rent-free estates within the same family for eight generations.

8. The functions of officers of several other denominations are
also mentioned in these records. Of these the office of the Chowdhuri
seems to have been the most lucrative, for the Kanungos were very keen

The Small Voice of History

to place their own men in this position. How they actually did by oust-
ing old established Chowdhuris, we have already seen above. Warren
Hastings would have certainly found in it a fine precedent for his
farming system that in 1 687 Gokul Chand took over Mahal Kapsnurma
from Dharmaraj Chowdhuri by agreeing to pay Rs 800 more than
the former jama . The duties of a wadahdar , farmer of revenue, were
in many respects the same as a Chowdhuri s. To quote from a parwana
appointing Durgaprasad Wadahdar for Aurangabad with effect from
1759,

He should duly perform the duties appertaining to that post with
honesty and integrity . . . He should make such efforts as would tend
to the prosperity of the ryots and to the increase in the cultivation more
than before. He should take care that theft and night attack did not
occur in the said Mohal. If perchance the property of any person be
stolen or pillaged, he should take steps and produce the thief and the
highway robber with the property and restore the property to its owner
and punish the gang of outlaw. Should he fail to trace them, he should
be held responsible for the same. He should refrain from collecting
the cesses prohibited by His Majesty. He should by his good treat-
ment keep the ryots and residents contented and should deposit in the
treasury the Government revenue by monthly instalments. He should
send necessary papers in due form to the office of the Motasuddis.

9. The same combination of duties connected with the collection
of revenues with those concerning the preservation of law and order
occurs also in the Naib Faujdars case, with the difference that the
emphasis is definitely placed on the latter aspect. It is remarkable,
however, that in the sanad appointing Bishnu Chand Naib Faujdar of
Aurangabad pargana (1734) there is nothing specifically military
about the duties assigned to him, except that he was asked to stop the
manufacture and sale of firearms. It is interesting therefore to compare
the following extract enumerating the duties of the Faujdar of Auranga-
bad with the terms of a sanad, quoted in Sarkar s Mughal Administration
(pp. 656), which mentions much more directly the military responsi-
bilities of this office.

He (Bishnuchand) shall collect every penny of the fair amount of reve-
nue and deposit the same in the Government Treasury and shall
not omit to collect a single farthing of it. He shall not as usual allow

Report on an Investigation of the Gauripur Raj Estate

deduction for Nankar etc. without inspecting the sanad and shall not
spend a single farthing without a reliable sanad. He shall by his good
treatment keep the ryots contented and shall take such steps as will
tend to the prosperity of the country, to the increase of income of the
Faujdari Department more than ever before. He shall punish the
wicked and treacherous persons, keep watch over the Malguzars and
prevent the iron- mongers from manufacturing guns etc. instruments
of war, and selling them to mischievous persons. He shall decide and
dispose of cases of suitors according to the provisions of the enlightened
Shorah, and take care that cases of theft and highway robbery may not
occur, and that the powerful may not oppress the weak. In the event
of such an occurrence, he shall send the parties to the Hazoor. He shall
avoid collection of prohibited items and shall send papers in due form
every month to the office.

10. There is not much in these papers about the conditions of the
ryots and the primary agricultural producers. But the many inciden-
tal references which are there might permit a certain generalization.
This taken together with the information furnished by the Buran -
jis and Fathiyah-i-ibriyah might help us in filling up many blanks in
the economic history of north-eastern Bengal in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. We have, for instance, that very significant refer-
ence {supra) to forced labour which confirms Shihabuddin Talishs
testimony that labour service rather than taxes formed here the main
source of a feudal magnates profit. Further, the fact that the Kanungo
was empowered by this sanad, dated 1676, to enforce begar on ryots
who had left his nankar estates to go over to a neighbouring pargana,
illustrates not merely the authority of the highest revenue officer of
the area, but also his pathetic dependence on the labour of his ryots.
In this part of Bengal, as possibly throughout the Mughal Empire, the
proportion of cultivable land to agricultural labour was so much in
favour of the latter that the bargaining power of the ryots, mentioned
by Philip Francis in his famous minute of 1 776, seems to have been
a phenomenon of very long standing, longer in any case than what
William Hunter thought when he put it as more or less a peculiar pro-
duct of the famine of 1770. The primitive or one might say natural
method — the only method in fact — yet known to the ryot for enforcing
this bargain was migration. To what extent this was a matter of great
concern for the authorities can be well understood from the emphasis

The Small Voice of History

laid by most of the sanads on the need to encourage extension of till-
age and increase of population. The Governments anxiety over the
desertion of ryots finds a very clear and poignant reflection in the fol-
lowing lines of a letter-patent:

The Zamindars of Pargana Parbatjowar Fatura should know [torn] the
ryots of Pargana Michara and Tafia Tasumpur had during the rebellion
of Ramhari the rebel [torn] absconded from the said Pargana and
settled in different parts of the country. You are required to make over
the ryots of the Pargana to Jivananda immediately after the receipt of
this parwanah so that he may bring them and cause them to settle in their
original place. Know this to be peremptory. Dated the 15th Rabius
Sani 4 1st year of His Majesty’s reign.

1 1 . This anxiety might affect the ryots either way. In certain cases,
as the above-mentioned sanads indicate, this led to the rehabilitation
of the migrating peasantry in their original homestead by force. But
there are also instances of another kind showing that the Government
sometimes adopted a very positive and reasonable attitude. Here is a
sanad which speaks for itself, showing how the Government ordered
a reduction of jama when it was convinced that the ryots were rack-
rented.

Know me, Chowdhuris, Kanungos, ryots and cultivators of Parganas
Mokarampur, Sarkar Dhakri, Vilayet Koch Hajo, by these presents:
‘Recently the amlalis and uthci set vants of the said Pargana appeared
before the Hazur and complained that formerly the Jama allotted to
the said pargana was Rs. 1 62-5 annas; that at that time the Pargana was
well populated and the ryots carried on cultivation satisfactorily and
thus the revenue could be realized at the above rate; that at present
owing to the desertion of ryots and for want of cultivation in the Par-
gana, not a farthing more than Rs. 40/- could be realized from the said
Pargana at the end of the year; and that if the revenue were demanded
at the above rate they would not be able to realize anything and the few
families of ryots still left in the Pargana would also run away. After
inquiry it has come to light that their complaint is just. Therefore, with
a view to remove the complaint in consideration of the fact that the
said Mahal is suffering from want of cultivation and is in a famishing
condition, Rs. 40- 1 4-5 Vi gandas have been fixed as the jama of the said

Report on an Investigation of the Gauripur Raj Estate

Pargana ... It is required that you should realize regular instalments
from the ryots and deposit this into the Imperial Treasury and should
not demand anything more from them until such time as the population
increases satisfactorily and the ryots are able to pay the revenue without
any complaint. Know this to be peremptory.’ Dated the 1st Showal
3rd Year of the reign of His Imperial Majesty.

If James Grant was guilty of a certain bias, it was because he interpreted
the history of Mughal revenue administration as an uninterrupted
record of cynical additions to the jama, without taking the least notice
of facts like those mentioned above. One has merely to go through the
minutes of the heartless debates of the Board of Revenue and the
Council at Fort William to realize how radically different and irresponsi-
ble was the attitude of the Company’s Government when it rejected,
as a matter of policy, all the numerous applications from the zamindars
of Burdwan and Midnapur for reductions in revenue on account of the
distress caused by the floods of 1787 and 1789—90.

1 2. The author very gratefully records here h is thanks to Rajkumari
Niharbala Barua, Kumar Prakri tish Chandra Barua and other members
of the Gauripur Raj family for rheir liberal and friendly assistance and
hospitality which alone made this investigation possible.

Rent in Kind and Money Rent
in Eastern India under Early
British Rule

The want of evidence, particularly of statistics good enough to
support logical constructions, obscures the history of rents in
India under early British rule. Landlords’ estate accounts, which
have been such a useful source of information on rents in Europe,
have either all perished in Eastern India, or, in rare cases where they still
exist, been altered or selectively preserved in such a manner as to make
them unreliable for the study of rents. In examining land grants and
deeds of transfer among the archives belonging to two of the largest
estates in this region, I have been unable to find a single document for
the eighteenth century stating the precise amount of rents charged or
paid for any given piece of land. The only papers which the zamindars
thought worth preserving were those relating to rent-free grants. This
strictly one-sided documentation was apparently inspired by the law
which exempted from fiscal demand all those parts of an estate that
paid no rent. This administrative generosity, introduced first by the
Mohammedans in India and rather reluctantly continued under early

Copyright © 1 963 Ranajit Guha. Unpublished paper presented to the Study
Group on Economic and Political Problems of Modern South Asia at the
School of Oriental and African Studies, London, 1963. [The citations in this
essays footnotes follow the abbreviated foim given in the available copy of the
manuscript. Full archival and publication derails, though unavailable here,
can with a little deduction and research be found out by those wishing to pur-
sue the sources. — Ed.]

Rent in Kind and Money Rent in Eastern India

British rule, had indeed for decades, even before 1757, been abused
by the landlords in a manner as to omit all quantitative statements
from the deed of lease, so that there could be no legal basis for the
Government to demand revenues on account of the land granted, nor
for the ryot to resist rack-renting. Thus, there is nothing much in the
surviving land deeds to furnish any useful information on the subject
of rents.

One, therefore, inevitably falls back on administrative evidence:
the reports, letters, and memoranda prepared by the officials of the
East India Company for the Government of Bengal and the Court of
Directors. There are two factors limiting the use of this kind of
evidence for the study of rents. First, a semantic difficulty. In many of
the records the words ‘rent’ or ‘revenue* and ‘land-tax’ are used as syno-
nymous. The immaturity of the vocabulary of political economy in the
pre-Ricardian period, the attempt often made under the influence of
the French economistes to seek an analogy between agrarian conditions
under the ancien regime and those of contemporary Bengal, and, of
course, the still unresolved dilemma about the nature of landed pro-
perty in the Orient (did it belong to the individual? did it belong to the
State?) — all these contributed in varying degrees to the confusion.

But the other and more serious difficulty arose from a matter of
policy. The economic policies of the Company’s government in Bengal
in this period were to a large extent determined by the urge for maxim-
ization of revenues. The result, inevitably, was a certain amount of
official indifference about problems’ of rent. Among the earlier ad-
ministrative records, therefore, we have not merely no Domesday
Surveys, but very little information on rental even for individual areas
or districts.

Paradoxically, however, it was often under the shock of a heavy fiscal
deficit that this characteristic blind spot would show any sign of
curing. On such occasions the alarm would be sounded at the seat of
government in Calcutta and communicated to all the districts, com-
manding the army of officials everywhere to get to the root of the
matter, to diagnose the disease at its source, to interview tenants about
their difficulties, investigate estate accounts, collect data, and send
reports. The yield of such fiscal breakdowns is indeed the most im-
portant raw material to serve for a reconstruction of the history of

96 The Small Voice of History

rents. However, the facts and figures gathered under such extraordinary
circumstances naturally suffer from a certain lack of continuity. In the
patchwork that follows the author has therefore made no attempt to
cover up the seams.

The variations of the Persian word for coins, nagd, denoted money rent
in Bengal ( nagad) and Bihar ( nagdi ). The vocabulary of produce rent,
on the other hand, was far from uniform and reflected, to some extent,
the local peculiarities in the customary mode of division of crops
between peasant and landlord. On the whole, however, rents in kind
fell into two classes, depending on whether the proportion of shares
was fixed or variable according to yield.

The former was known as sanja. ‘The Sajah lands , wrote an officer
in 1790, pay at all times the same, be the season more or less favourable
or the lands altogether unproductive.’1 In spite of the element of risk
which, as the writer suggests, was inherent in this form of tenancy, all
contemporary accounts speak of the advantages of the system. William
Bolts, writing in the early 1770s, had evidently sanja in mind when
he said, ‘Ground producing rice, pease, wheat, barley and other grain
generally pays one half of the crop, in which mode some products
make the hega very valuable, as the lands in Bengal, from the extraordi-
nary fertility of the soil, in most places produce two, and in some even
three crops of grain in the year.’2 And to return to the observations of
the officer quoted above twenty years later: ‘Many ryots holding lands
by this tenure ... are extremely well off, for should they be . . .
producing a crop of rice and one of cotton etc., nothing is paid for the
cotton or whatever may be the second crop.’

These two statements extend over a period of about two decades in
the late eighteenth century the suggestion of a long trough in the grain
market when the peasant was keen to keep his money rather than
his grain, and was confident that he could always buy cheaply what he

1 West Bengal District Records: Burdwan Letters Issued r, p. 264. Proceedings of
Board of Revenue* 29 March 1790.

2 Bolts, Considerations , vol. 1, p. 148.

Rent in Kind and Money Rent in Eastern India

needed for stock and subsistence and even supplement it by a second
or third crop. One has merely to compare these earlier remarks with
a statement in the Report on the 1951 Census of Bengal characterising
sanja as a serious evil* which ‘keeps the cultivator under an ever-
increasing load of debt and prohibits any form of agricultural develop-
ment’.3 As the Report points out, sanja was revived in modern times
(until its abolition in 1956) by usurious landlords who used to pur-
chase peasant holdings originally paying a low money rent and resettle
them on terms of rent in kind. It was, in other words, a clever in-
vestment in pauperization by which the producer was deprived of the
benefits of a highly developed market. The difference between these
two official views about the same problem is, indeed, a measure of the
change or lack of it, as registered in the rural economy of Bengal during
a period of 1 80 years: a form of rent, the very existence of which was
once conditioned by the weakness of money economy, was resurrected
in our age under the direct patronage of moneybags.

Ill

More complex and perhaps more prevailing than sanja was the other
form of rent in kind which was based on a variable proportion of crops
shared between peasant and landlord. This was known as bhaoli in
Bihar, where it existed in a simpler form than in Bengal. ‘Bhawly, says
a report of 1778, ‘is adjusted by a Survey of the land cultivated, when
the crop is so far advanced as to enable appraisers to give a near guess
at the quantity of the grain which will be produced, which after the
usual deduction made for the Cultivator s share, is rated according to
the Current price of the respective Grains in the District and the
Zemindars or Tickadars engage to pay for the Zemindar, or Govern-
ment s share in cash.’4

The bhaoli of Bihar was thus based on a pre-harvest estimate of the
output and adjusted to variations in yield. Some kind of a sliding scale
based on an estimate of the actual produce was also known in Bengal,

3 Census of India, 1951, vol. VI, pt IA, p. 220.

4 Richardson to Patna Council, 12 October 1 77%, Proceedings of the Governor-
General in Council , 24 November 1778.

The Small Voice of History

but there the process ofsharing was somewhat more refined. Alongside
kut khamarvth\c\\ , like bhaoli, was based on an estimate of the stand-
ing crop, there was the other variation, khal khamar? based on a post-
harvest estimate made after the grain was carried to the threshing floor
and separated from chaff. Here is an extract from a contemporary ac-
count of the two modes of estimate:

The straw in both cases is the property of the ryot.5 6

Not to recognize the distinction between kut and khal but to limit
oneself, as Verelst does,7 to the generic term khamar , is to miss an
important point. But at a time when agriculture, unaided by science,
was entirely dependent on nature, and the old irrigation system no
longer in order, an unexpected spell of drought or rain or the wicked
caprice of a river like the Damodar or the Teesta could, by ruining the
standing crop, give the lie to the fairest of prophecies. The Great
Famine of 1770, as well as the many local and partial famines which
occurred in Bengal in the early days of British rule, were mostly the
result of a catastrophic intervention of nature between the field and
the barn. Bishnupur, one of the districts most affected by the famine
of 1770, provides a striking example of the kind of difficulty which

5 Khal , according to Wilson’s Glossary , is a threshing floor, a place either in
the field or in a shed where the grain is trodden out of the husk . . . also, a place
where the grain of any individual of the village . . . was . . . stacked until its
value had been estimated by the Collector, and security for the revenue due on
it given.*

6 Proceeding of Board of Revenue, 29 March 1790.

7 Verelst, View, p. 69.

Rent in Kind and Money Rent in Eastern India

could arise from such eventualities. Here, die payment of rents in kind
was based on a pre-harvest assessment of shares. When, however, the
winter crop of 1 769-70 was ruined by drought and there was no grain
to pay as rent or revenue, the peasants were left to the mercies of the
tax-collectors who agreed to accept payments in cash calculated at a
rate thrice the current price of grains.8 No wonder then that under
such circumstances the cultivator preferred the assessment to be made
after the harvest rather than before.

As the mode of assessment varied from region to region, so also did the
actual principle of division of the crop between landlord and tenant.
The report from Bishnupur mentioned above refers to equal shares,
but another from the neighbouring district of Burdwan speaks of an
alternative principle according to which the landlords share was only
one-third. Colebrooke, who may be trusted for accuracy, gives the fol-
lowing as the usually agreed proportions of the peasants share in
various parts of the country: that is, a half, two-thirds and three-fifths.

In actual practice, however, the peasant s income under this system
of rents fell far below his stipulated share. An element of indigence and
want of capital for initial outlay — characteristics of the Bengali peas-
ant s economic condition noted by all eighteenth-century writers —
were a necessary ingredient of the khamar ryots obligations. As Verelst
pointed out, the one settled rule’ about a contract for khamar was that
an advance in money is made by the Zemeendar to the cultivator, by
the help ofwhich he tills and improves the land.’9 The system of aiding
the peasant by agricultural loans (j takavi ), first introduced in India by
the Mohammedans and continued under all subsequent regimes, was,
unfortunately for the khamar ryot, the thin end of the wedge which
foredoomed the profits of his labour. For, under conditions of a
stagnant economy, when landownership and usury were, like Siamese
twins, inseparably fused, what the zamindar gave to the cultivator with

8 Proceedings of the Controlling Council of Revenue at Murshidabad , vol. IV,
pp. 39-40.

9 Verelst, op. cit., appendix, p. 234.

100

The Small Voice of History

one hand he had the exorbitant rate of interest to help him to take away
with the other. The rate of interest on such loans, according to Bolts,
could be even so high as upwards of forty per cent, per arm. to be repaid
from the produce of the ensuing crop.’10 How usury, combined
with fraud, helped the landlord to appropriate the ‘lions share from
khamar lands is thus described by Verelst: ‘When the crops are cut and
gathered in, they arc generally divided between the cultivator and the
zemeendar; from one third to one half to the cultivator, and the
remainder to the Zemeendar; when the former accounts with the latter
for the amount of the advances, which are often taxed by the Zemeendar
with a heavy interest, or fraudulently exceeded by an arbitrary valuation,
far below the market price of the goods or the products of the land in
which he is paid.’11

Briefly sketched in these lines we have the eighteenth-century back-
ground of the sharecropper s plight. For the evidence about the con-
ditions of tenancy in khamar lands clearly makes it out as a form of
metayage, and the identification is further confirmed by the con-
temporary use of the words ‘ khamar and 'adhy as synonymous. 12 This
latter term, derived from the Sanskrit word for half, denotes the arith-
metical share of the crop due to the producer in exactly the same way
as the words medietaria, mitayage \ halbpacht , and helftwinning do
for a similar phenomenon in the economy of medieval Europe. We
have it on record in Verelsts Instructions to the Supervisors as well as
in a Collector s letter written about twenty years later that ‘the Comar
lands have no settled tenants but are cultivated by contract’. 13 The men
engaged were, as a rule, peasants who did not reside in the village,
but were recruited by the landlord from the neighbourhood. They
had little or no land of their own, so that even the uneasy contract for
khamar held out for them some prospect of improving a subsistence
budget. An adhiyar , that is, metayer, was in fact defined by Buchanan-
Hamilton in the early years of the nineteenth century as ‘a man who

10 Bolts, op. cit., p. 150.

11 Verelst, op. cit., appendix, p. 234.

12 Proceedings of the Committee of Circuit , pt III, p. 100.

13 Verelst, op.cit., appendix, p. 234; Proceedings of Beard of Revenue, 24 June
1788.

101

Rent in Kind and Money Rent in Eastern India

has stock sufficient to keep a plough, but has no land, and cultivates
that of others for a share of the crop/ He was, therefore, utterly de-
pendent on the landlord for loans with which to buy the seed — a
characteristic he had in common with his medieval European proto-
type,14 and what was thus a simple matter of economic co-operation
between lessor and lessee assumed, through custom and the usurers
device, the sanctity of an unwritten law. According to Buchanan-
Hamilton the rate of interest enforced by the landlords was as high as
1 00 per cent, which is two and a halftimes the rate mentioned by Bolts
forty years earlier. Buchanan-Hamilton, however, goes on to say that
the condition of the metayers was ‘better than that of hired servants or
daily labourers ? 5 The comparative bliss of the sharecropper was thus
a measure of the distress of other sections of the rural proletariat.

The emphasis on tenure by contract and on cultivation by labour
recruited from outside the village rather than locally has a suggestion
of impermanence abour it. This impression is only too well confirmed
by an official statement defining the transitional character of khamar
lands. ‘Comar Lands’, it was observed, ‘or those that pay in kind are
in general only such as the Government or Farmer may be desirous of
bringing into a State of Cultivation, and that when this purpose has
been effected, they are then usually rated with the Malguzaree Lands
and pay a fixed Rent.’ 16 The particular context in which the statement
is made makes it quite clear that by ‘fixed Rent’ what is meant here is
money rent.

Khamar, then, is a shifting category distinguished by the converti-
bility of its rent from crop to cash. This was, perhaps, the reason why
those who owned such land were not eager to lease it out on a perma-
nent or long-term basis until the process of transformation was

14 Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. 1, p. 307.

15 Martin, History, Antiquities , Topography and Statistics of Eastern India ,
vol. Ill, p. 296.

16 Proceedings of the Controlling Council of Revenue at Murshidabad, vol. VI,

p. 261.

102

The Small Voice of History

completed. The statistics in the first four tables illustrate how this
process actually worked. They all relate toasingle district, the Twenty-
four Parganas, for two years separated by a decade. From the absolute
quantities of revenue land paying in money and in kind, as mentioned
in Table 1 , it would appear that the relative proportion ofkhamar land
decreased from 32 to 10 per cent within ten years. Table 2 compares
these figures with the total area of revenue land in each year taken as
100 to show how the relative size of the sector of rents in kind dimi-
nished during this period and that of the other sector expanded. The
causal relation between these two contrary movements is at least to
some extent indicated by the figures given in Tables 3 and 4. Column
3 of Table 3 exhibits for each fiscal zone the marginal area which,
though still regarded as khamar, paid rent no longer as a raw share of
the produce, but its equivalent in money. This category of land, dar -
i-thika as it was called, thus represented that part ofkhamar which was
being constantly monetized and absorbed in the other sector of rent.
The exact measure of corrosion of the area ofkhamar is to be grasped
from the fact that only four out of the sixteen fiscal zones paid in
raw produce and four only in money, while the relative size of the
monetized sector, as shown in Table 4, was as high as between 33 and
66 per cent in four out of the remaining eight zones and well above 1 00
per cent in two others. There is in all this the suggestion of a forward
movement of rents and of an element of dynamism in the rural eco-
nomy of the time which permits the more mature form of rent to take
over the losing domain of the other.

It is precisely mobility of this kind which makes it difficult to work out
the proportions of the two kinds of produce rent — sanja and khamar.
In other words, to the want of quantitative data which, in general,
makes the study of rents for this period statistically so difficult, is
added the complexity of a class of rents constantly giving way under
the impact of prices. Verelst seems to have been quite aware of this
problem when he says that ‘the amount of these (khamar) lands
must ever be uncertain, as the rents being paid in the products of the
land, their value depends wholly on the sale of such products.’ In spite

103

Rent in Kind and Money Rent in Eastern India

of this, however, there are some very good reasons to think that by far
the greater part of the rents in kind was paid as khamar and not as
sanja. This is the impression one gets from the contemporary records
which in referring to rents in kind invariably speak of khamar (or as
the case may be, bhaoli), but seldom of sanja. And for a typical area,
Mandalghat in Burdwan district, where the greater part of revenue —
over 85 per cent in 1795 — was derived from lands paying rents in
kind, we have a distribution of fiscal estimates for two successive years
in terms of sanja and khamar showing the decisive preponderance of
the latter (Table 5).

The preference for khamar among the cultivators themselves was
no doubt the result of their anxiety to seek in this a form of insurance
against uncertainties of nature. Sanja with its rigid and invariable pres-
cription of shares could help in a year of plenty. But in a region like
Mandalghat, where an unpredictable spate in the Damodar might any
day reduce the rice fields to sandy waste, it was wiser to insist rhat the
landlord s share, like the ryots own, should depend on the actual yield.
The document from which figures for Mandalghat have been quoted
above mentions a total loss of revenue amounting to over Rs 1 8,000
in this area resulting from the floods of 1 795. The Damodar andTeesta
valleys were no doubt easier victims of flood than many other parts
of Eastern India, but the poor state of the embankments called for
caution everywhere. And whether within striking distance of a river
or not, peasants all over the country had learnt their lesson from the
experience of the year 1769-70: the crops might fail any time if the
gods so willed; hence an adjustment of the landlord s share according
to the actual output was for the cultivator the best guarantee of survival
in a lean year.

For the proprietor too, the flexibility of khamar had certain ad-
vantages. Khamar was, indeed, the cutting edge of agriculture and
colonization. In regions laid waste by the famine of 1770 and others
where the jungle had not yet been struck by the pioneers axe nor the
land turned by a plough, leases were granted to immigrants on condi-
tions of khamar. At a time when there was plenty of such land available
the ryots could, with a little encouragement, be expected to pursue the
receding frontier of the broken and clodded field in a way that even-
tually, as Verelst had predicted with great optimism only a few months

104

The Small Voice of History

before the famine, population would flow from the more crowded
parts of the country to these hitherto neglected voids and thus equili-
brate town and country. Touched though it is by a few tints of gold
borrowed from the political economy of Enlightenment, this pretty
picture came to assume a semblance of perverse reality when the
famine, striking in a contrary direction, levelled the population any-
way. Urban settlements, particularly those in the northern and western
parts of the provinces, which had only a few decades ago excited the
imagination of ballad writers, now joined the anonymous emptiness
of the countryside. And in the ensuing scramble for manpower in
which the Government, the big and smaller landlords, and the new
class of revenue farmers were all desperately going to engage during
the next thirty years or more, khamar assumed an unprecedented
importance in the eyes of all proprietors. Under conditions of an
abysmal fall in rents and abundance of land when the demand for agri-
cultural labour lagged hopelessly behind supply, khamar was the only
big bait with which the landlord could hope to coax the ryots of a
neighbouring estate to come and put some work on his own. It was,
indeed, the only ‘Grow More Food’ campaign in India in the last two
hundred years which could claim to justify itself in terms of the re-
muneration proposed for the cultivator.

VII

It was a characteristic expression of the irrationality of Bengal’s rural
economy at this time that a form of rent, so eloquently commended
in 1 769 by the Government, should prove to be a source of great
embarrassment only two years later. The Company’s revenue receipts
had not yet been fully monetized and throughout the early period of
its administration in Eastern India a pan of the fiscal estimates for
many districts had to be made in measures of grain converted to their
equivalent in money at the current rates. Unfortunately, however,
there is nothing in the records that would make it possible for us to
know the exact quantities of money and grain received as land revenue
from the three provinces. For the global estimates, whether for a single
area or for the entire province, were always made in terms of money —
a most reasonable practice considering the difficulties involved in

105

Rent in Kind and Money Rent in Eastern India

accounting otherwise. Yet there are some very explicit, though inci-
dental, references which taken together seem to suggest that in many
regions, particularly those which were less developed and where agri-
culture was not sufficiently insured against natural risks, a considerable
part of the revenues was still being collected in kind. For instance, the
official expectation of increase in revenues from ‘the sale of the pro-
duce of Khummaur lands’ and from additional produce of Comar
lands’ was in a certain pargana of Burdwan 71,9, and 30 per cent of
the increase from all sources taken together for 1791-2, 1795-6, and
1797-8 respectively.17 The higher estimate for 1797-8 compared to
that for the previous year corresponds to an increase in the price of rice
by 43 per cent between 1796 and 1798. 18

The considerable loss of revenue during the period of severe agri-
cultural depression in 1771-3 in many districts is further proof of the
influence which a fluctuation in the value of articles constituting rents
in kind could have on fiscal receipts. Within a year of the famine,
characterized by scarcity and very high prices, the authorities in
Calcutta started receiving from all the northern districts what they
called complaint relating to the Plenty of Grain . It was, indeed, a most
extraordinary case of embarras de richessey and was thus described by
a local officer with unsuspecting irony. ‘The present Cheapness of all
kind of Grain , he reported, ‘is also a Reason why so little Revenue can
be gathered this Year . . . We have here but a very few Hands left ... to
till theGround — and the Cheaper the produce of the little Land which
they can prepare, the less Revenue of course must be expected from
it: — and as the Collections here proceed entirely from the Harvests a
greater Scarcity would produce a larger Revenue than the present
Abundance.’19This was from Bhagalpur, where the famine had hit the

17 These figures are calculated from data on the regional accounts in West
Bengal District Records: Burdwan Letters Issued , pp. 48, 306, 486.

18 The wholesale price of rice in Burdwan was, in rupees, .47 per maund in
1796, .57 in 1797, and .67 in 1798. Ibid., pp. 239-40, 267, 349.

1 9 Proceedings of the Controlling Council of Revenue at Murshidabad , vol. VI,
p. 278. Also see Proceedings of the Committee of Circuity pt III, pp. 1 80-2. Com-
pare this statement with a similar view expressed by an anonymous English
pamphleteer of the same period: ‘The farmers are always more afraid of a good

1 06 The Small Voice of History

hardest. But similar reports were received also from Rajshahi, Rang-
pur, and Purnia. In this latter district prices fell within a few months
between 300 and 400 per cent for better qualities of grains like rice,
wheat, and grams, and about 500 per cent for inferior ones like barley
and pulses. In many areas the peasants gave up cultivation; in others
the standing crop was left to rot unharvested; and that half of the
population of Purnia which had somehow managed to survive the
scourge of famine now sought in desertion the only escape from the
scourge of plenty. The fiscal demand for 1 772-3 had to be reduced by
31.25 per cent of that of the previous year, and even this was not easily
collected. For the entire region affected by this slump the Government
concluded early in 1773 that ‘there is no Doubt that the present
extraordinary Plenty and Cheapness of Grain have been the Principal
Cause of the low Proposals made for the Collections of the present and
perhaps also the ensuing Year’.20

In Tables 6 and 7 we have some data to illustrate how actually the
revenues were affected by the changing value and volume of rents in
kind during the period ofWarren Hastings’s first Five-Year Settlement.
As worked out in proportions of 1 00 in Table 7, 13.5 and 4.7 per cent
of the respective totals of increase and decrease in revenues arise from
variations in the quantity and value of articles constituting rents in
kind. In absolute quantities the amount of deficit on account of rents
is about one and a half times that of increase, an unmistakable evidence
of the failure of Hastings’s economic measures to redress the damage
done by the famine and, in fact, of continuing decline. This is brought

year than a bad one . . . They are more afraid of corns being at too low a price
in consequence of plenty to pay them the expenses attending the growth of it,
than what they call a middl ing crop. They prefer half a crop with a proportionably
advanced price to a full harvest/ Anon, An Inquiry into the Causes of the Present
High Prices etc. (1767), p. 32, quoted in G.E. Mingay, ‘The Agricultural De-
pression, 1730-1750’, Economic History Review , 2nd series, VIII (1956),
p. 327. It is interesting to remark on the many similarities in effect between the
Depression in England described by Mingay and that in Bengal in the 1770s,
namely, the higher fiscal deficits, the distress of the peasantry, desertion by
tenants, and so on.

20 Proceedings of the Committee of Circuit , pt III, p. 137.

107

Rent in Kind and Money Rent in Eastern India

out even more sharply by the proportions of increase and decrease for
each district: in six out of nine for which we have complete figures the
percentage of deficit is higher than that of increase. Altogether we have
here, represented in figures, the many links which throughout the
eighteenth century connect the fruits of harvest in Bengal with the
ledgers of Leadenhall Street and thereby suggest a moral which, appa-
rently, had not yet been learnt in 1776.

VIII

These interrelated fluctuations in revenues and prices were, in the last
analysis, based on changes in the behaviour of rents under the impact
of the grain market. For a further analysis of this process we now turn
to certain cases in Bihar showing how the movements of the two forms
of rent, in money and in kind, were inversely related to changes in
price.21

When an enquiry was made in 1 778 into the causes of a fiscal deficit
in three areas of Bihar, namely Ikil, Ukri, and Bhelawar, it was found
to have been the result of an abrupt fall in prices. As shown in Table
8, taking the prices of 177/ as 100, there was a sharp decline in all
articles: 45 to 93 per cent in cereals and cereal products, 64 to 84 per
cent in pulses, and 72 to 80 per cent in oilseeds. And there was no
decline in cultivation; on the contrary, as over 4,296 bighas were added
to tillage in 1 '778-9, representing 16 per cent of the cultivated area of
the previous year. The correlation of rents and prices under these
conditions is clearly demonstrated in the sectoral distribution of tillage
between the two forms of rent. Rent in kind, already quite predominant
in each of the three regions in 1777-8, covering as it did 69 per cent
of the total area under cultivation, swells enormously under conditions
of the slump the following year and reduces the sector of money rent
to a mere fraction of the cultivated area — from 30 per cent to 1 8. The
cultivation of lands paying in money falls offby 2,412 bighas or over
29 per cent, and that of lands paying in kind increases to 6,71 1 bighas
or over 36 per cent. In the entire region over eighty-one bighas out of

21 For the sources for this section of the paper, see R. Guha, ‘Evidence on
Some Correlations of Rents and Prices in Bihar under Early British Rule’, Pro-
ceeding of Indian Historical Records Commission .

108

The Small Voice of History

a hundred pay rent in kind in 1778-9. We have, thus, in these figures
a clear illustration of one of the fundamental trends of the rural
economy of the period: that produce rent tends to expand and money
rent contract under conditions of falling prices .

We have a case on record for Purnia at a subsequent period to show
how this correlation is reversed when prices are moving up instead of
going down. This district, so hopelessly depressed in the period after
the famine, had apparently turned the corner within fifteen years, and
the prices of October 1 786 were on a par with those of the prosperous,
though short-lived, spring of 1 771 . Early in 1 709 the Collector spoke
with confidence about the unusually* high prices received for the
autumn harvest of the year just ended and of equally high expectations
for the winter crop of 1 788-9. The unreserved optimism of his report
does more than make up for the want of price statistics for 1788, and
we have a more or less steady slope which culminates in a clear rise of
22 to 75 per cent in cereal prices between 1786 and 1789.

There are a large number of documents, though no statistics, to
show that the movement of rents under these conditions was exactly
the opposite of what it was during the slump described above. These
documents are a record of interviews between the Collector of Purnia
who visited che area in December 1789 and a large number of land-
lords and peasants. The evidence shows that the ryots began to change
over from rent in kind to money rent in 1788-9. In the high prices
of 1787 they must have found some sort of a solid assurance for
the future — an end to what presumably had been a trough. So, in the
invariable language of the landlords, the peasants ‘insist to pay
Nukdee’, that is, money rent. And it is one of those rare occasions in
the history of the long-drawn controversy over tenancy deeds dur-
ing early British rule when the ryot was definitely proved to be in the
wrong. There is much in these records to show that the cultivator
violated the standing agreement to pay rent in kind — for the simple
reason that it no longer conformed to economic realities: the changes
in grain prices had dated the deed. The methods used by the ryots to
get round the terms of the old agreement follow the familiar pattern
of the period. Asked to produce the deeds prescribing, according to
them, the payment of money rent, they report the loss of the documents.
One of them is said to have bribed a petty official and received from

109

Rent in Kind and Money Rent in Eastern India

him a paper authorizing payment for four additional acres of land in
money instead of in produce. Another who has to pay rent for half of
his lands in money, and for the other half in kind, is accused of neg-
lecting to weed the latter with a view that the produce being small in
consequence of the neglected cultivation, the officers of Government
may be induced to accept of Nukdee rates.’ And so on. How far this
bid for a rational adjustment of rents to prices resulted in changing the
exact proportions of the two kinds of rent cannot, for want of statistics,
be measured. But there is enough in this dossier of the Collector of
Purnia to show how during this period money rent tends to expand and
produce rent contract under conditions of rising agriculture prices .

These documents on Purnia are, in a way, the record of a dialogue
between opposing social interests brought to clash by a radical change
in the price level. In all cases brought to the Collectors notice the
landlords were arguing for a form of rent clearly unprofitable for the
ryot. They pleaded that ‘Nukdee be made Bowlee’, and then certainly
the revenues may be well collected. ’ The Collector promptly responded
to the suggestion and decided on every issue in favour of reversion to
rents in kind. At a time when the Government was seriously discussing
such radical measures as the abolition of all internal duties in order
to ensure freedom of trade, and leading officials like Thomas Law
were quoting Montesquieu and Turgot in justification of anti-feudal
reforms, it is interesting to see a local Canute commanding a power-
ful and progressive movement of rents to recede. In doing so he was,
of course, basing himself on a perfectly understandable sense of iden-
tity of interest between what he himself described as ‘the rights of the
Zemindar and the Security of Government.’

In contesting for rents in kind, the landlord, thus backed by official
policy, was on his part disputing the peasants claim to dispose of the
marketable surplus of grains. To the extent that money rent was to
deprive him (in his purely landowning capacity) of the opportunity to
profit from rising prices, the opposition was irreconcilable. Relating
this element of conflict in social interest to the movements of rents and
prices already discussed, it may therefore be concluded that under
the existing conditions of the economy of Eastern India in a period of
rising prices the proprietors were inclined to resist and the producers prefer
the expansion of money rents at the expense of rents in kind

110

The Small Voice of History

Glossary

Bhaoli

Rent in kind in Bihar for which the assessment
of shares was done before harvest; land paying
such rent.

Bigha

Measure of land approximately equal to one-third
of an acre.

Dar-i-Thika

Payment of rent in kind by the money equivalent
of the landlord s share.

Katha

One-twentieth part of a bigha , that is, about one-
sixtieth part of an acre.

Khal-Khamar

Rent in kind in Bengal for which the assessment of
shares was done after harvest (see Khamar).

Khamar

Rent in kind in Bengal for which the assessment
of shares varied according to yield; land paying
such rent.

Kut-Khamar

Rent in kind in Bengal for which the assessment of
shares was done before harvest (see Khamar).

Nagad, Nagdi

Money rent; land paying money rent.

Pargana

A fiscal zone.

Rupee

Money equivalent of approximately one-eighth of
the English Pound in the late eighteenth century.

Ryot

Tenant cultivator.

Sanja

Rent in kind in Bengal for which the assessment of
shares was invariable .

Zamindar

Landlord.

Tables

The figures for the earlier year in Tables 1 and 2 are from Verelst s View ,
etc. Those for the other years as well as the data abstracted in Tables 3,
4, 6, and 7 have been taken from the Proceedings ofthe Board of Revenue,
Miscellaneous Series, Records Department of the Government of West

Ill

Rent in Kind and Money Rent in Eastern India

Bengal, Calcutta. The figures in Table 5 have been calculated from a
statement in West Bengal District Records: Burdwan Letters Issued , p.
264. The sources for the other tables are the same as indicated in a
footnote to Section VIII of this paper.

Table 1

Lands in Twenty-four Parganas Paying Rents in
Money and in Kind

(Area in Bighas)

Year

Money Rem

Rent in Kind

1767

620,535

198,305

1776-7

512.094

49,839

Table 2

Relative Size of Lands Paying Rents

in Money and in

Kind in Twenty- Four Parganas

(Total

area of Revenue Land - 1 00)

Year

Area under Money Rent

Area under Rent in Kind

1767

75.8

24.2

1776-7

86.1

8.4

112

The Small Voice of History
Table 3

Khamar Lands in Twenty-Four Parganas Paying Rents
in Produce and in the Money Equivalent of the
Landlords Share (1776-7)

(Area in Bighas and Kathas)

Fiscal /one
(those marked
pay only in
money rent) (1)

Area paying
only in

Produce

(2)

Area paying
in the money
equivalent of
landlord's share (3)

Total

(4)

Kha.spur

55-18

224-17W

Dakhinsagar

Shah pur

1 500-9

1590-9

Panchannagram

Shahnagar

259-9

32-19

292-8

Pcchakhali

5937-14

2162-12

8100-6

Chur

2055-2

Azimabad

2314-13

1532-13

3847-6

Muragacha

11442-15

5094-16/2

16537-11/2

Madanmal

1513-19-%

1882-18/2

3396-18%

Betia

2798-91/2

5038-16/2

7837-5

Calcutta

Mogra

8607-10%

746-14

9354-4%

Khurree

Hatiagar

5930-161/2

5930-16/2

Bari j hat i

12812-8

Table 4

Relative Size of the Area of Khamar Lands in
Twenty-Four Parganas Paying Rents in the Money Equivalent
of the Landlords Share (1776-7)

(Total Khamar in each zone = 100)

Khaspur

33.1

Dakhinsagar

Shahpur

nil

Panchannagram

Shahnagar

12.7

Table 4 (< contd .)

113

Rent in Kind and Money Rent in Eastern India

Table 4 (contd.)

Pcchakhali

36.4

Ghur

nil

Azimabad

66.2

Muragacha

44.5

Madanmal

124.4

Betia

180.1

Calcutta

Mogra

8.7

Khurree

Hatiagar

nil

Barijhaci

nil

Table 5

Revenue of Lands in Mandalghat Paying Rents in Kind

(Total Annual Revenue « 1 00)

Year

Lands Paying a fixed share

Lands paying a variable

of the produce (Sanja)

share of the produce

(khamar)

1795

5.0

95.0

1796

28.7

71.3

Table 6

Increase and Decrease of Land Revenue in 1772-6
from Changes in Yield and Price of Articles
Constituting Rents in Kind

(in Rupees)

District

Increase in
revenue from
increased
yield and
price

Total Increase
in Land

Revenue taking
all sources
together

Decrease in
Revenue
from fall
in yield
and price

Total Decrease
in Land
Revenue
taking all
sources
together

Bhag^lpur

40,858

298,584

Birbhum

95,989

Bishnupur

7.642

35,328

12,249

20,787

Table 6 (contd.)

114

Table 6 (contd.)

The Small Voice of History

(in Rupees)

District

Increase in
revenue from
increased
yield and
price

Total Increase
in Land

Revenue taking
all sources
together

Decrease in
Revenue
from fell
in yield
and price

Total Decrease
in Land
Revenue
taking all
sources
together

Hijli

30,395

2,012

Hugli

538

26,501

225

34,402

Midnapur

52,624

208,600

39,098

119,991

Rajmahal

1 ,590

32,875

1,516

23,607

Rajshahi

1,272

1,413,646

Rokunpur

3,970

62,202

694

111,284

24-Parganas

521

Total

66,987

491,890

95,929

2,024,313

Tabic 7

Relative Increase and Decrease of Land Revenue

1772-6 from Changes in Yield and Price of Articles
Constituting Rents in Kind

District

Increase in Revenue from

Decrease in Revenue

increased yield and price

from feli in yield and

(Total increase in land

price (Total decrease in

revenue = 1 00)

land revenue = 1 00)

Bhagalpur

13.7

Birbhum

0,1

Bishnupur

21.6

58.9

Hijli

0.0

0.8

Hugli

2.0

0.7

Midnapur

25.2

32.6

Rajmahal

4.8

6.4

Rajshahi

0.1

Rokunpur

6.4

0.6

24-Parganas

; ?

115

Rent in Kind and Money Rent in Eastern India

Table 8

Price of Agricultural Products in Three Parganas of Bihar
in 1778-9

(Index Number: 1777 = 100)

Cereals and Cereal Products

Mundua

71.4

Sauty

45.6

Makai

61.1

Cunguy

65.0

Samagh

62.5

Paddy

63.3

Cuddrani

70.0

Rice (fine)

93.8

Rice (coarse)

90.9

Wheat

73.7

Barley

77.4

Pulses

Mash

66.7

Coorty

64.5

Moongh

66.7

Peas

84.6

Khesary

82.3

Gram

78.5

Gulian

81.8

0/7 Seeds

Tory

72.7

Rcnry

84.6

Mustard Seed

80.0

Graft, Greed, and Perfidy

In the dying fall of the Mughal empire in Bengal we have a perfect
scenario for a Peter Brook to handle: a kingdom changing hands;
a quick succession of dynasties; a crown for auction to the high-
est bidder; men of straw playing kings under the steely eyes of
king-makers; and a lot of gold and bloodstains everywhere. There
were no roses to symbolize the conflicts. Yet to contemporaries it
might have had all the appearance of a civil war, for even the English
were acting very much as partisans backing Number Two of the realm
against Number One, the Nawab of Bengal, and most of the senior
servants of the East India Company were known at the Court of
Murshidabad by their Persian titles. It was left to the Company’s cri-
tics in London to identify Clive as an Englishman: to Mir Jafar he
was ‘the lights of my eyes, dearer than my life, the Nabob Zobdut ool
Mulk Mayenodowla Sabut Jang Bahadr’. Warren Hastings was Jaladat
Jang Umdat ul Mulk, and Vansittart, Munir ul Mulk Ali Jah Shams-
ud-daulah Nasir ul Mulk, and so on. And the English behaved just
as they sounded: in graft, greed, perfidy, double-crossing, and back-
stabbing there was nothing to distinguish them from their contempo-
raries among the native aristocracy.

They did not lift one civilizing finger at Miran, heir-apparent and
hatchet-man of the regime, when he executed Mirza Mahdi, a boy of
fifteen and a potential rival, by crushing him between a pair ofwooden

Copyright © 1970 Ranajit Guha. Review of Abdul Majed Khan, The
Transition in Bengal 1756-75: A Study of Saiytd Muhammad Reza Khan (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 376pp., first published in South
Asian Review , 3, 3 (April 1970), pp. 262 -3.

117

Graft, Greed l and Perfidy

planks. Nor did any high-minded principle prevent them from brib-
ing Rai Durlabh by a five per cent commission on all he secured for
the Company* so that they might go on screwing his erstwhile friend,
Mir Jafar, for more than the price he had promised to pay for their help
in engineering the coup. It took them just about two years to squeeze
the mango dry and start looking for a successor while still pretend-
ing to be friendly to Mir Jafar. Of the two possible candidates, both
of whom could be trusted to pay handsomely for their promotion,
Hastings chose Mir Qasim as the best way of baiting the Nawab: it
would provide the latter with a subject for his jealousy to feed on and
inculcate in him a due sense of dependence on the English alliance*.
So, a secret treaty was drawn up and duly signed by the pretender and
his patrons. Three Bengal districts were handed over to the Company
as an initial payment. English troops were made to demonstrate in
favour of the new Naib Subahdar. Nobody asked the Nawab to go. But
he took the hint, retired to Calcutta, and abdicated. The Naib Subah-
dar became the Nawab.

in the end, however, this ‘revolution* turned out to be less satisfact-
ory than its originators had expected. The marionette seemed to have
a mind of its own and started objecting to the strings that attached it
to not-so-invisible hands. It became increasingly clear that to have
their way in Bengal the English should be able to grasp the form of
power as well as its substance. So the apparatus of intrigue was set
in motion again. But Mir Qasim proved to be less self-effacing than
his predecessor. A battle had to be fought to eliminate him. By 1765
the Company was firmly saddled into the diwani of Bengal, Bihar,
and Orissa under a puppet Nawab with whom it was so much easier
to coexist.

But the triumph of Buxar did not end their troubles. In the process
of their accession to diwani, they had acquired a thorn in their side
that continued to hurt. For it was in 1 765, too, that Saiyid Muhammad
Reza Khan was appointed to the key office of Naib Nazim and Naib
Diwan. He closely emulated the first two Nawabs of post-Plassey
Bengal in trying to collaborate with the British without breaking away
from the Alivardian, that is, the classic Mughal tradition of reve-
nue administration. Like those unfortunate Nawabs he, too, had to
pay a price for trying to achieve the impossible. For the agrarian system

118

The Small Voice of History

which the East India Company had inherited was ill equipped to
cope with the fiscal demands they imposed upon it. That such pressures
might overheat the economy and paralyse it altogether were not clearly
foreseen at this stage.

It was his attachment to tradition rather than foresight that made
Reza Khan resist these pressures by what the author has picturesquely
described as a series of rearguard actions. The conflict between his men
and the Company’s servants at all possible levels of the administration
went on mounting throughout the quinquennium of his office and
reached its climax by 1772 when he was dismissed.

It was thought fit to bring the affair to an elegant end by putting him
up for trial on a number of charges, including those of corruption and
embezzlement. He was found innocent and eventually reinstated in
office as Naib Nazim — where he was no longer required to act as the
Nawabs watchdog over the land tax. The trial and acquittal of^R,eza
Khan are both a matter of recorded history. But thanks to a peculiar
combination of ignorance and prejudice — the latter immortalized by
Bankimchandra Chatterjee’s powerful and unfair indictment in Ananda-
math — it was only the chargesheet which stuck in popular memory.
Abdul Majed Khan has done well to rehabilitate him.

In handling Reza Khan’s brief he has brought together a great deal
of useful information from all the relevant sources except, it seems to
me, the archives of the Government ofWest Bengal. And the document-
ation is impressive. Too impressive, perhaps. One has to wade through
a massive plethora of facts without any guidance as to what is signi-
ficant and what is trivial. Much of it is very trivial indeed. The author
seems to suffer from fetishistic attachment to the detail of the day and
the month and the year for every chit that was written or every con-
versation that took place. As a result the narrative slows down to the
pace of Stevenson’s donkey with nearly as much wit about it. In short,
this is dissertational history at its best — or worst — an erudite, impor-
tant, and thoroughly unreadable piece of research: a PhD candidates
trophy, a supervisor s pride, and a reviewer s agony.

The Agrarian History of
Northern India

These two books, despite the near similarity of their titles, repre-
sent rather different kinds of exercises. Dr Elizabeth Whitcombe
follows the somewhat antique convention of writing Indian
economic history as the life-history of economic policies. Even then,
no historian in recent times has used th is convention with greater effect
to describe and indict the developmental policies of the Raj. The origi-
nality of her approach to the late-nineteenth-century public works and
official agro-economic projects in Uttar Pradesh (UP) lies in the way
she has stapled together their environmental and developmental impli-
cations and extended the scope of an economic critique to include the
natural foundations of agriculture.

It is her discussion of canal irrigation that best demonstrates the
power of this approach. A total length of 56 thousand miles of canal
irrigating somewhat more than 1 .4 million acres took 30 years and
over £4.3m to construct. How far did this irrigation ‘in the grand
manner benefit the people? It provided more water for their fields in

Copyright© 1974 RanajitGuha. Review of Elizabeth Whitcombe, Agrarian
Conditions in Northern India. Volume I: The United Provinces under British
Rule , 1860-1900 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California
Press, 1972), pp. xxviii + 330; and Asiya Agrarian Change in a Northern

Indian State. Uttar Pradesh 1819-1833 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973),
pp. x + 212, first published in the Journal of Peasant Studies* 1, 4 (July 1974),
pp. 534-6.

1 20 The Small Voice of History

the best of times, but led to the abandonment of wells as an alternative
and more secure, if less abundant, source of supply. More water could
mean excessive water, too, and this caused flooding, swamping, and
an increased incidence of malaria in some areas. It tempted the villag-
ers to concentrate on growing the more lucrative commercial crops at
the expense of foodgrains. The result was that a failure of rains could
cut off (as it did in 1 877) the supply of the peasant’s own food and the
fodder for his animals and make him starve in spite of the prospect of
a ‘valuable* harvest of indigo and sugarcane later on in the season.

That the lure of the market led to overcropping and exhaustion of
the soil was noticed at the time. What, however, was not grasped soon
enough was the manner in which the land was being irrevocably ruined
by the very element that was supposed to keep it productive — namely,
canal water itself. For the combined impact of canal irrigation, tropical
heat, and the tread of plough oxen was to produce a ‘double hardening*
of the fields. This encouraged saline efflorescence ( reh ) which poisoned
the surface soil and turned it into usar. (Incidentally, Dr Whitcombe
is wrong in deriving usar from the Sanskrit word ushtra , meaning
‘camel*, rather than from ushara , meaning saline soil*.) The spread of
reh was first officially noticed in 1 871 . A scientific treatise attributing
it to canal irrigation was published in 1874. This was confirmed, in
1 878, by the findings of the Reh Committee. By 1 891 the counterpro-
ductive aspects of the canal system* had triumphed decisively enough
to enable an official observer to speak of the areas of commercial crops
in usar tracts as ‘oases in the salt-covered desert * . This imagery indicates
quite accurately the scale as well as the quality of a monumental fail-
ure of the post-Muciny dream of transforming the Indian economy by
‘Saxon energy and British capital*.

The contrast between vision and achievement didn’t have to be
limited to British imperial claims alone. Dr Whitcombe, in reflecting
on this irony in the way she does, could have extended it to cover nat-
ive liberalism too. Dinabandhu Mitra acted as its muse in versifying
about the grand canal* as ‘an achievement that is out of this world*. The
Hindoo Patriot compared Cautley to ‘the prophet of Israel* who struck
with the trowel the flinty soil and there gushed forth a mighty stream*.
It confidently predicted in 1854 that the canal would ‘regenerate a
sterile country' and ‘transform a wilderness into an orchard*. Within

The Agrarian History of Northern India 121

two decades it was clear for all to see that a saline wilderness had esta-
blished itself in the Garden of India and was spreading.

It is worth commenting on such colonial petty-bourgeois day-
dreams that served as a foil to the imperial illusion of grandeur, if only
in order to indicate the convergence of both these brands of liberal-
ism on a somewhat magical belief in science — the belief that science,
meaning technology, could be trusted radically to promote economic
growth even without any corresponding changes in the social relations
of production. The Indian writeis mentioned above were ecstatic
about Cautleys command of science which ‘rectified’ ‘the blunders
of nature. This was not merely an airing of a scientific spirit reared
in Western-style schools, but also an echo of the rulers’ assertion of
technology as a symbol of civilization triumphing over the ‘old world
barbarism’ oflndian peasant practices. Consequently, as Dr Whitcombe
observes, ‘problems of ecological imbalance were discussed in engi-
neering terms with no more than piecemeal consideration for the
social issues involved’.

Such technocratic attitude to agricultural development did not dis-
appear with the transfer of power in India. On the contrary, the suc-
cessor regime seems to be so firmly entrenched in this particular liberal
heritage that the consequence of their current exercise in improvement,
the so-called Green Revolution, may be said to be indistinguishable,
in a significant respect, from tha^ of the nineteenth-century projects
formulated thus by Dr Whitcombe: ‘Only that minority of the rural
population already in a position of prosperity and sufficient power to
maintain some independence of action had access to the benefits of in-
novation.’ Plus qa change plus q'est la meme chose .

It is unfortunate that this important thesis should have received less
than adequate support from the rest of the work. To some extent, per-
haps, this is simply a matter of presentation. The author in true Malet
Street fashion allows the documents to speak for themselves in a far too
literal sense. As a result, the text appears to be dominated, in style as
well as in content, by chunks of official prose strung together in endless
succession. This makes the book rather less readable than it could have
been. More seriously, it debases the argument itself and leaves one with
the impression that the historian has here identified her own standpoint
with that of her mid-Victorian informants in regarding essentially

1 22 The Small Voice of History

economic questions as legal ones. One has to read the section on the
structure of rural society to realize how in this day and age it is still pos-
sible for a writer on agrarian conditions to look upon a structure of
classes based on competition for social and economic resources as a
mere concatenation of customary haqs.

By contrast, the excellence of Dr Asiya Siddiqi s monograph rests
precisely on her ability to penetrate beyond the legalism characteristic
of official documentation in order to gain an insight into the reality of
rural life in UP during an earlier period of the last century. The for-
mat of her work is conventional enough. The usual rubrics on tenure,
assessment, and revenue settlement are all there. But unlike most other
historians of nineteenth-century India she refuses to allow institutional
description to obscure the economic aspects of agrarian relationships.
Almost for the first time in recent Indian historiography taalluqdarsy
zamindars , muqaddams y raiyats , and various other denominations of
villagers step out of the glossaries of fiscal terms into the real world of
rural class society. No one familiar with the literature on the subject can
fail to appreciate this as a considerable achievement.

Dr Siddiqi achieves this by maintaining throughout the text an
unflinching concentration on the principal form of appropriation of
the peasants surplus as rent. It is quite clear from what she has to say
that underlying the innocuous haqs there was a complex system of
rents, including labour rent and produce rent, which embodied essen-
tially pre-capitalist relations of production and yet coexisted with a
growing sector of cash crops meant not merely for an incipient na-
tional subcontinental market but also for export abroad. In fact some
of the most important aspects of her researches relate to the influence
of monetization and price movements on rents and the way this af-
fected rural credit and official arrangements for the collection of land
revenue. Her treatment of commercial agriculture is necessarily less
thorough than Benoy Chowdhury’s more extensive work on the sub-
ject. Its primary function here is to serve as a cue to a brief but intense
account of the agricultural depression which hit UP in the 1830S. Its
consequences were catastrophic: ‘Peasants were abandoning their
lands. Zamindars had suffered losses. Moneylenders had been ruined
because the loans they had made had not been repaid; many of them
now refused to lend money to the cultivators. Land had depreciated in

The Agrarian History of Northern India 123

value: innumerable cases were reported of estates being put up for sale
and no buyers coming forward. Finally there is evidence that cultivation
had contracted.’ One could hardly improve on this as a description of
the impact that the other great depression had on the subcontinent a
hundred years later.

PART II

Subaltern Histories

Neel Darpan : The Image
of a Peasant Revolt in a
Liberal Mirror

‘There appeared among the ryots a general sense of approaching
freedom. They behaved as if about to be released from something
very oppressive, and as if impatient of the slowness of the process. * —
W.J. Herschel, Collector and Magistrate of Nadia, in his evidence
to the Indigo Commission (RIC 2819c).

Sivnath Shastri has recorded the impact Dinabandhu Mitras
play about the indigo ryots had on his generation: 'Neel Darpan
involved us all* [21: 224)} One wonders why. The author was
far from well known yet. He was one of those young men, patronized
by lshwarchandra Gupta, who managed to have some bad prose and

1 We have used the text of Neel Darpan (which means, literally, ‘a mirror of
indigo’) as given in Dinabandhu-Rachanavali (Sahitya Samsad Edition; Cal-
cutta : 1 967). Translations are our own. We have not used Michael Madhusudan
Dattas rendering into English, because it is slipshod, inaccurate, and altogether
unrepresentative of the brilliant colloquialism of the better parts of the original.

Bibliographical references are indicated by sets of numerals enclosed within
brackets. The arabic numerals preceding and following a colon stand respectively
for the serial number of a publication listed up at the end of the essay and its
page or pages. A roman numeral indicates, when it occurs, the volume number
of the given publication.

1 28 The Small Voice of History

worse verse published in the Sambad Prabhakar between 1 853 and
1856. Then he seems to have disappeared from the Calcutta literary
scene altogether for a number of years until he surfaces again, in 1 860,
with a play published, far from the metropolis, in Dacca. All of which
makes of this a pretty obscure story so far. Was it then the literary and
dramatic merits of the work that made such an immediate impression
on its contemporaries? The answer, alas, must be in the negative if
Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay s somewhat left-handed tribute,2 and
Dwarakanath Vidyabhushans unenthusiastic response [//, IV: 689] ,
to the play are any measure of prevailing critical opinion. Was the
impact, then, due to the authors documentation of despotism and
distress? Not likely, because there was nothing in Neel Darpan in terms
of information that could not have been known already to the Calcutta
intelligentsia. Many of them came from the indigo districts and
continued to maintain close links with the villages there. Some of the
leaders of the social and intellectual life of the city — the Tagores of
Jorasanko and Pathuriaghata, for instance — were planters themselves.
Moreover, an influential section of the press, owned and edited by the
Bengalis, had been reporting the plight of the indigo ryots and the
tyranny of the European planters at regular intervals throughout
the 1850s. These reports could leave no one in doubt about what was
going on in these parts of the province, particularly in Jessore and

The abbreviation R/C stands for Report of the Indigo Commission Appointed
under Act XI of I860 with the Minutes of Evidence taken before them; and
Appendix (Calcutta: 1 860). Figures followed by V refer to answers by witnesses
to questions put to them by the members of the Commission; those followed
by V indicate the relevant parts of the Report itself; and those followed bv a’ refer
to an appendix in Tart One of the Report.

A much abridged and rather different version of this study was published in
the Calcutta weekly, Frontiers in December 1972.

1 In his famous essay on Dinabandhu Mitras life and works Bankimchandra
Chattopadhyay appears to be torn between his critical judgement and his loyalty
towards a dear, departed friend. The verdict he reached after a certain amount
of beating about the bush is perhaps best summed up as follows: ‘ Grantha bhalo
hauk armanda hauk , manushta bado bhalobashibar manush\ meaning ‘Whether
he wrote well or not, he was a most loveable person’ [4: 833].

129

Neel Darpan: The Image of a Peasant Revolt

Nadia districts. Harish Mukherjee’s Hindoo Patriot came out very
strongly indeed on this subject, and at least nine of those historic
despatches from its brave Jessore correspondent, the young Sisir-
kumar Ghose, had already appeared in its pages between March and
August 1 860, that is, during the six months that preceded Neel Darpan
[2: 7-36].

What, then, was it that made the publication of not-so-bright a
play in the mufassil by not-too-well-known a writer on not-too-
unfamiliar a theme appear like a comet on Bengal’s social horizon* [21:
224]? The answer is simply that it was the European planters reaction
to the play that triggered the baboos’ response to it. For, it is indeed
curious that although Neel Darpan was published in September 1 860,
it was not until May 1 86 1 that the Calcutta intelligentsia began to take
any serious notice of it. During these eight months a number of things
happened due to an apparently accidental lapse in communication
between the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal and the Secretary to the
Government of Bengal on what was indeed a routine administrative
matter [3: 197—205\ 14: 207-2 ] and culminated in the planters’ deci-
sion to make the play a cause for libel. It was at this point that the
literati of Bengal came to realize that the defence of Neel Darpan could
be made to look like the defence of the peasantry without anyone
risking his head at the hands of the planters’ lathials . So when James
Long, inspired equally by his concern for the ryots and his eagerness
to shield the Lieutenant-Governor from embarrassment [14: 802 1,
stepped out to receive the days crown of thorns, the leading lights of
Calcutta rallied behind the good Englishmen (missionaries and officials)
as against the bad Englishmen (planters). And thus Neel Darpan
became the instrument — one could almost say, pretext — for the fabri-
cation of a nice little middle-class myth about a liberal Government,
a kind-hearted Christian priest, a great but impoverished poet, and a
rich intellectual who was also a pillar of society — a veritable league of
Power and Piety and Poetry — standing up in defence of the poor ryot.
Coming when it did, this myth did more than all else to comfort a
hhadralok conscience unable to reconcile a borrowed ideal of liberty
with a sense of its own helplessness and cowardice in the face of a
peasant revolt.

130

The Small Voice of History

The response to Neel Darpan during its first fifty years could be best
characterized as liberal-humanitarian. It was liberal in the politics
that inspired it and humanitarian in the idiom that expressed it.
Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, who knew the author very well, de-
fined this idiom thus: ‘Dinabandhu used to feel greatly moved at other
peoples distress and Neel Darpan was an outcome of this particular
quality. It is only because he sympathized so completely with the
misery of the ryots {projas ) of Bengal that Neel Darpan was written
and published’ [4: 825]. It is this empathy that makes Neel Darpan
the most forceful of Dinabandhu s plays, as Bankimchandra rightly
observes [4: 835]. How forceful can be judged from the anecdote
about an outraged Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar hurling his sandal at an
actor playing the role of the senior planter with a particularly vicious
realism. This, as we know, never actually happened [13: 594f. Yet like
all myths it refers to reality a few removes away. It is, in this case, an
idealized description of the manner in which the middle-class audience
would itself respond to the play with a mixture of pity and indignation:
for Vidyasagar was known to be a most compassionate and fearless
man.3 Sivnath Shastri sums up the emotions evoked by the play when
he says: "Neel Darpan engrossed us all; Torap ran away with our af-
fection; Kshetramoni s distress made our blood boil with anger; and
we thought that if the planter Rogue fell into our hands, we would, in
the absence of any other weapon, teai him to pieces with our sheer
teeth’ [21:224],

Brave words. In reality, however, this show of righteous anger turns
far too soon into a tearful supplication. The liberal feels genuinely
outraged by the tyranny of the planters. Their predatory ways violate
his own attitude to the ryot, which is a curious concoction of an
inherited, Indian-style paternalism and an acquired, Western-style

3 One wonders if this should not be regarded as a classic example of myth
resulting from a complete reversal of reality. For, we have it on the authority of
Binodini Dasi that Neel Darpan , staged in 1875 by the Great National Theatre
Company in Lucknow, was broken up by the European members of the audi-
ence when Torap, in the rape scene, forced his way into the planter s apartment
and beat him up [8: 1? \ 98-100],

131

Neel Darpan: The Image of a Peasant Revolt

humanism. To the extent that with all his growing association with the
big city he has, still in the 1 830s, vital links with the village, he feels
both his economic position (as one who lives off the peasantry) and his
socio-cultural authority (as a member of the rural elite) threatened
by the planters. He wants to stand up for the peasantry and in doing
so defend himself. Yet he is unable to act on his own. He is ready to
connive at the ryot arming himself against the planter. But he would
not take up arms. That would be as illegal as the outrages committed
by the planters themselves. The only way to end oppression is for the
law to assert itself. It is the Government, the true custodians of the law,
who alone can restore the rule of law. Hence, in a land of superstitions,
the new theology of liberalism introduces yet another superstition to
fit the politics, the morality and the sensibility of a colonial middle-
class: corresponding to the illiterate peasant supplicating the gods
against blight and drought we now have the highly literate baboo sup-
plicating the local magistrate, the Lieutenant-Governor, the Governor-
General, or the Queen — the status of the member of the pantheon
addressed depending on the degree of deprivation — for relief from the
'blue monkey’ overrunning the countryside.

The stand taken even by the most advanced liberals like Sisirkumar
Ghose illustrates this. His involvement with the jacqueries of 1 860-
1 in Jcssore, the hottest district, went further than perhaps that of most
other intellectuals of the time. Long before it became customary for
eyewitness accounts of popular struggles to be fabricated in cool in-
teriors around Chowringhee, Sisirkumar, at great personal risk, insisted
on being where the action was in the deep countryside and reporting
it to Harish Mukherjee for publication in the Hindoo Patriot. Scion of
a rich ralukdar family, he had been involved in disputes over land with
the planters long enough to know their ways. With his intimate know-
ledge of the Jessore district and his grassroot links with the peas-
antry he had no difficulty in reading the signs that were there, in
the spring of 1860, of a rapid build-up towards armed conflict. The
planters were driving the ryots up the wall by terror; the Govern-
ment had moved in troops who joined the planters in hunting down
the ryots; the latter were firm in their resolve not to grow indigo. Yet,
hopefully, Sisirkumar described the mood of the ryots on the eve of the
clashes as passive*. He was obviously indulging in wishful thinking

1 32 The Small Voice of History

when he wrote that the ryots will neither attack nor defend, but
are ready to suffer’ [2: 8] — a statement so Gandhian that it seems to
have inspired Jogesh Chandra Bagal, the distinguished authority on
nineteenth-century Bengal, to characterize the indigo peasants revolt
as ‘the first non-violent mass movement’ [2: 5]. In a letter narrating
in detail how the ryots were getting ready to deal with repression meas-
ure for measure — villagers being arrested en masse , peasants in north-
western Jessore pledging themselves never to sow indigo, nine hundred
of them marching from Kalopole to Calcutta — Sisirkumar could still
exhort the rest of the population in words like these: ‘Rise, rise, ye
countrymen with supplicating hands, fall prostrate before the Governor,
catch his feet, and do not let him go unless he has granted your requests’
\2: 8-9] . His faith in the Raj remains unshaken even when he is himself
made an object of official persecution. Incensed by his exposure of the
collusion between planters and the custodians of the law, a vindict-
ive magistrate starts a district- wide hunt for him forcing him to go
to the ground. ‘Yet’, he writes, ‘I hope Mr. Belli, one of the best of
Judges . . . will not leave me unprotected.’ When the good judge does
not seem to be responsive, and the magistrate, failing to lay his hands
on Sisirkumar, starts harassing the rest of his family, the prayer is
simply addressed to the next higher authority, the Lieutenant-Governor
‘who, I hope, will protect them [his family] from such unjust attack of
the Magistrate’ [2: 23 , 28 , 32].

In the event the Ghoses of Polua-Magura came out of all this less
battered than the Basus of Swarapuf whose faith in the Raj did little
to save them from disgrace and ruin as described in Neel Darpan . For
the play, its author’s intentions notwithstanding, is a clear indictment
of the futility of liberalism as a deterrent to tyranny. It is the story of
the failure of a liberal government to shield its subjects from oppres-
sion and of the liberals to defend themselves.

Ill

Dinabandhu was himself a distinguished product of that historic
hothouse of liberal culture, Hindu College, Calcutta, lie exemplifies
much of mid-nineteenth-century liberalism both in his own life and
that of his characters. To identify a Hindu liberal of this period is easy

133

Neel Darpan: The Image of a Peasant Revolt

enough. One has simply to find out where he stood on some of those
great questions relating to Hindu society that separated the reform-
ists from the no-changers. As a firm opponent of child marriage and
kulin polygamy, and equally firm supporter of Vidyasagars campaign
for legalizing the marriage of widows, Dinabandhu ranks high as an
advanced liberal. These themes figure prominently in many of his
plays. What, however, is even more impressive is the radical sentiment,
dating from his days in Hindu College, that anticipates the reformism
of the later years in much juvenile verse and prose. A poem written in
1853 calls for defiance of customary prejudice — lokachar — on these
social issues and appeals to reason: ‘Once upon a time people used to
believe that the sun goes round the earth once every year, whereas it has
now been established, thanks to the advancement of knowledge, that
it is the earth which goes round the sun [15: 412-13] . It is less than
flattering for us to recognize that in order to justify Reason against
Authority we have to recall Copernicus for the very first time in 1853
in a manner which in the West had already turned into a platitude by
then! Yet, it is this very awkwardness which is so attractive about it. It
is the fumbling and fall of a new scepticism that has just come into
being and not found its feet yet. Its weakness is congenital and it will
never qualify forTagore's imagery of the Puranic fledgling shooting up
through space to devour the sun. For Reason is born spastic in a colony.
T his is precisely why one must be prepared to acknowledge the pathe-
tic dignity of its attempt to assert itself. In Dinabandhu s case we have
his admiration for physics blasting tunnels for railroads, for museums
as the storehouse of scientific objects and literature, and for Cautley s
engineering which in the teeth of Hindu superstition forced the waters
of the Ganges into a canal [24: 10] — all to testify to a sense of wonder
about science as an agent of change [75: 342-3, 380, 404].

If change, technological as well as social, is an achievement of
science, the latter is itself a gift of education which, as Bankimchandra
was soon to point out, had already become synonymous with Western-
style education by this time [4: 680] . In recording his own enthusiasm
about it Dinabandhu speaks for the great liberal illusion of his age
regarding the ability of a bourgeois intellectual culture to free so-
ciety from feudal ideas all by itself. In Neel Darpan we have the response
of an affluent Kayastha family to the new education. The father who

134

The Small Voice of History

apparently has had no Western-type schooling himself, is still very
proud of Bindumadhab, his younger son, going to college in Calcutta
[Act IV, Sc. 3 ]. He has in fact considerably added to his own status by
getting for his son a bride from a leading suburban Kayastha family
who, normally, would not marry their daughter off to a lad from
an obscure village, but were persuaded to do so when they found out
how well educated Bindumadhab was [Act V, Sc. /]. The young wife
shows something of her relatively urban and emancipated upbringing
when she soliloquizes about the dull domesticity of her existence thus:

We are born women. We are not allowed to go for a stroll as far as into
our own garden even when we are a company of five girls together.
We are not allowed to go for a walk in the town. It is not possible for
us to set up welfare societies. We have no colleges, no law courts, no
Brahmo Samaj to go to. There is nothing to entertain a woman when
she is sad in her heart. [Act II, Sc. 2]

She is obviously familiar with the fruits of Western culture herself, for
she has been pestering her husband for a volume of Shakespeare’s
works translated into Bengali. The young man, writing to her from the
big city, enthuses about the benefits of literacy, for ‘I am able to speak
directly to you even over such a great distance!’ But communication,
alas, has to be a one-way traffic: his mother would not permit her
daughter-in-law to write to him [Act II, Sc. 2]. For female education
is still at this time anathema even among the more advanced Hindus,
particularly those who were country-based, and it is a measure of the
still unimpaired feudal values that a girl of her social standing must not
be allowed to make her sentiments so public as to write privately to
her husband!4 The women of the family, however, are not against

4 The attitude to female education continues, apparently, to divide Hindu
middle-class parents and children during the second half of the nineteenth
century much as it did in the 1 820s and 1 830s. How a child-wife of 9, married
in 1826 to a boy of 1 5, pursued literacy surreptitiously in the midst of her
domestic chores and with the sole encouragement of her husband, is described
thus in The Life of Grish Chunder Ghosc . . by One Who Knew Him (Calcutta:
191 1): ‘In the intervals between her culinary operations she used to scrawl on
the kitchen floor the letters of the alphabet with a piece of charcoal and thus

135

Neel Darpan: The Image of a Peasant Revolt

putting her literacy to good use and have her read out the tales of
Vidyasagars BetalaPanchavimsati for their benefit during the afternoon
break between chores [Act I } Sc. 4] . Finally, note must be taken of the
importance Navinmadhab, the principal protagonist of the play and
elder son of the family, attaches to education. He hopes, when the
planters’ depredations are over, to set up a school within the grounds
of his own homestead: for, nothing could make me happier than to
have our native boys schooled in my own house; this would indeed be
a true fulfilment of my wealth and my exertions’ [Act II, Sc. 3 ]. Apart
from projecting the author s own enthusiasm for the new education —
he ran away from his village home, when still very young, in order to
avoid old-fashioned schooling at the local pathshala and to seek ‘Eng-
lish education’ in Calcutta [21: 249] — this confirms how by the
middle of the nineteenth century schools had already joined the list
of traditional public works such as temples and tanks as an index of a
landlord’s munificence as well as of his obligation to the rural popu-
lace. It was partly thanks to such patronage and official encouragement
(Navinmadhab found the Inspector of Schools most responsive to his
idea) that a network of colleges and secondary schools spread fast
throughout the indigo districts during the 1850s [14: 61] — a deve-
lopment regarded by the planters and their barely literate minions with
utter hostility.5 ‘My Lord*, says the indigo factory’s dewan to his boss
in Neel Darpan , the establishment of schools in the countryside has
made the peasants more turbulent than ever', to which the planter
replies, ‘Yes, I must write to our [Indigo Planters’] Association to

learn to write. She would afterwards carefully rub out the letters lest she should
be detected in the forbidden occupation. Her only preceptor was her husband
who was then a student of the Hindu College. During his hebdomadal visits
to Konnagar she used to learn from him to read and write at a late hour of the
night when feeling quite weary after the day s hard work ... In the course of a
few years she was able to read all the best books then existing in the Bengali
literature . . .’ [i: 63]

5 The Tattvabodhini Patrika (1850) had the following to say about the edu-
cation of the planters’ karmacharis : A little arithmetic represents the upper limit
of their education; they have never tasted true learning, nor have they acquired
a moral education’ \1 1, II: 129].

1 36 The Small Voice of History

petition the Government on this issue. We shall fight to stop schools
from being set up [Act /, Sc. 3]. 6

As the reader familiar with the text may well recall, these extreme
sentiments follow immediately upon an exchange between Sadhu-
charan, a principal ryot, and the officials of the Begunberey factory. In
a cleverly engineered dialogue Dinabandhu drops a word that explodes
like a bomb. The ryots use of an elegant, polysyllabic, sanskritized
word ‘pratapshali* (meaning ‘mighty’), sets off a series of interlock-
ing reactions. The dewan, an upper-caste Hindu, asks him to shut
up, because for a common peasant to use sadhubhasha is to over-
reach himself. The planter picks up the cue and (in a sentence which
schoolboys have made all their own: banchat bada pandit hoiachhe)
admonishes him for his pretension to learning. The amin is outraged
that a man from a family that works on the land should use a language
so far above his status. But he is not surprised. Such insolence is only
to be expected of a trouble-maker like this particular ryot who had the
cheek to advise the peasants on points of law relating to indigo and thus
stir them up.

It is this link between an awareness of the law and what looks even
remotely like education that the planters detested so much. The amin
was furious because he suspected Sadhucharan of wanting to sue the
planter. ‘This bastard wants to take this matter to the Court’, he reports
to his master [Act I, Sc. 3]. The fear was not unjustified. In the very first
scene we find Navinmadhab pressing his father to take the Basu
family’s dispute with the factory to a court of law. Throughout the
indigo districts the victims of the planters had been trying to seek the
law s protection. A Collector of Jessore observed early in 1 862 how the
ryots ‘had acquired a fondness for litigation* [14: 189]. And it was true,
too, that a man who was literate had a better chance of securing justice

The European planters’ objection to education for the peasantry in 1 860
on the ground that this would increase their resistance to indigo, echoed twenty
years later by the Bengali zamindars of Bakarganj because 'they are afraid that
education would make the ryots more obstinate in withholding payments of
their rents' [6:289].

137

Neel Darpan: The Image of a Peasant Revolt

than one who was not. Sisirkumar reported a case from Jessore in 1 860
to illustrate this point. A number of peasants falsely charged with
assaulting a factory official were all convicted in a magistrate’s court,
whereas a zamindar s naib, accused at the same time of leading those
very men into precisely the same affray, was acquitted, no doubt the
Magistrate not daring to punish a man so unjustly, who knows how to
read and write [2: 73].

No wonder that the educated Bengali found in the law a great ally
and an object of the highest admiration. Throughout much of the
nineteenth century he went on propagating, defending, and popular-
izing it. He brainwashed himself and others in favour of what he
believed to be its impartiality and its powers to defend the poor. He
queued up for jobs in the civil service as its junior custodian. He passed
the law examination and set himself up to interpret and practise it in
various roles as barrister, advocate, vakil , mukhtar \ and attorney. He
stuffed his samiti , samaj , and sammelan with lawyers. He recruited
lawyers to his dawL He made the bar library the centre of local politics.
He elected lawyers to represent him at the Indian National Congress.
He sent lawyers to lobby for him in England , a mission greatly admired
by our author [75.’ 404] . Above all, he made law into the most lucrative
of the liberal professions. In some verses (Asha in Divadas Kavita)
about an unemployed youth frustrated in his attempts to find a job,
Dinabandhu leads him on to conclude: ‘Oh, I have been quite mis-
taken . . . I shall no longer go on supplicating those men of affluence . . .
I shall devote myself to the study of law, pass the law examination, set
up as a vakil, make money on my own and share it with the poor
. . . This will make my family happy; and of course, it all ends
happily: ‘He studied law, took the examinations, passed, enrolled as
a vakil, became prosperous and all his hopes were fulfilled at last*
[75: 401],

This association between law and literacy is far from fortuitous.
These are two of the more essential components of the culture,
respectively, of the British ruling class and of their Indian collaborators.
They mutually sustain each other. The institutional network of edu-
cation and that of the law soon become interdependent. Education
helps in schooling the bureaucracy that runs the colonial apparatus
which it is the task of the law to define (by jurisprudence), regulate (by

1 38 The Small Voice of History

the judiciary), defend (by penalties), and rationalize (with the aid of
the legal profession) . They both help the violence of the State to express
itself in a cultural idiom. The two work fairly closely together through-
out the entire period of British rule in India. It is true that as we move
towards the end of the nineteenth century, and into the twentieth,
certain non-antagonistic contradictions arising from the progress of a
section of our bourgeoisie from infancy to adolescence begin to make
thei r appearance. But there can hardly be a doubt about the thoroughness
of their collaboration in the earlier period.

The Bengali lawyers’ attitude towards the indigo peasants revolt
offers some evidence in this respect. In Neel Darpan the author builds
up the lawyers as defenders of the ryots against the planters. Wood is
very angry about a law graduate who writes against the planters in the
press [Act III, Sc. 7], and Navinmadhab, his principal enemy, is said to
have worked closely together with some vakils and mukhtars in a
recent law suit against the factory [Act I, Sc. 3] . Dinabandhu Mitra thus
helps to promote a myth about the morality of the legal profession.

The truth of the matter is that with the exception of a few indivi-
duals like the mukhtarTitu Chakravarti, whose incarceration caused
much noise at the time [5: 183-4; 14: 152\ , the lawyers sided with the
ryots only so far as it was either safe or profitable to do so. Thus, they
figure prominently in the list of signatories in the anti-planter petition
addressed to the Lieutenant-Governor in 1854 from Nadia while
the agitation was still at a low key. A similar petition addressed to the
Lieutenant-Goveinor five years later by the people of the same dis-
trict, when it is already poised on the brink of an armed encounter be-
tween planters and rvots, carries not a single lawyers signature on it
[14: 65, 76}. There were, indeed, a number of legal practitioners —
small number , according to Kling f 14: 86} — who helped the ryots by
acting for them in the mufassil courts and reporting on their plight
to the Calcutta press. Most of them had their services paid for by
Harish Mukherjee [ 14: 121}, and the young man who, in Neel Darpan ,
became the cause of the planter s displeasure, might well have been one
such mukhtar-correspondent of the Hindoo Patriot. Some lawyers did
better than others and were said to be receiving a monthly salary of a
hundred rupees each from tire British Indian Association for pleading
for the ryots, an allegation which, it must be recorded, the Association

139

Neel Darpan: The Image of a Peasant Revolt

was unable to confirm [14: 1 19-20] . In fact, when at the height of the
revolt the planters went on a rampage and the local European officials
in many areas swung into their support and venal rewards were not
much in sight, legal advice for the ryots was not easy to mobilize. Even
Harish Mukherjee with all his immense prestige barely managed to
recruit three lawyers from Calcutta and send them up to defend some
peasants hauled up before the law in Nadia. No mukhtar in that
district outside the sadar station ‘could be induced to take up a ryots
case’, a fact remarkable enough ‘to be noticed both by the editor of the
Hindoo Patriot and the Lieutenanr-Governor of Bengal [5: 183-4; RIC
3878 e, 3880 e\. And in Jessore, the scene of many clashes, the local
lawyers were, as we gather from Sisirkumar Ghoses biographer, de-
terred by the fear of the planters reprisal from holding brief for the
peasants [19: 404] .

Whatever the truth of the lawyers’ attitude to the peasant revolt of
1860, Dinabandhu Mitras enthusiasm for the legal profession was
quite in order. By speaking well of it, he was speaking up for the law
itself. For Neel Darpan is dominated by the idea of legality. The op-
position between good and evil is represented throughout the play as
a fairly straightforward opposition between those who are for the law
and those against. Navinmadhab and his family are for the law, law-
yers, and legal processes; Wood and his men are against all these. What
complicates matters is the undoubted existence of bad laws. Act XI of
1860, which gave criminal jurisdiction to magistrates in civil cases of
breach of contract and thereby made indigo cultivation into a form of
‘forced labour [14: 137], was precisely such a bad law. The planter
gushes over it and regards it as an improvement on the shyamchand
[Act III, Sc . 1] , the dreaded instrument of torture used so often to break
the peasants’ resistance to indigo.

The bourgeoisie, in the period of their ascendancy in the West,
made defiance of bad laws into a political virtue of the highest order
and invested the best of their heroes with it. By contrast, for the leaders
of our up-and-coming liberalism the law, however harsh or wicked, is
sacrosanct; not beyond question, it is still something that must not be
actively defied. They would bend backwards to be considerate about
it and explain away its iniquities in terms of maladministration. That
they could adopt such an attitude even to an obvious monstrosity

140

The Small Voice of History

like Act XI — nicknamed ‘ryot coercion act’ — should be particularly
revealing for those who retail the myth of a progressive’ intelligentsia
acting as a firm ally of the indigo peasantry in I860. Even for Harish
Mukherjee, with all his involvement in the cause of the indigo culti-
vators, cit was not the law itself but its administration that was cru-
cial* [ 14: 13 A . 7 And Dinabandhu Mitra expresses a central tenet of the
political philosophy of his class in the words of his hero, Navinmadhab,
thus:

What a cruel Act has been introduced! But why blame the law or the
law-makers? It would not have been so disastrous for the country had
the custodians of the law handled it without partisanship. Alas, how
many innocent persons are crying their eyes out in prison, thanks to
this particular Act! . . . O Lieutenant-Governor, none of these ills
would have occurred if only you had matched your laws with the ap-
pointment of equally good men to administer them. [Act III, Sc. 2]

The merit of this attitude is that it opens up for the liberal an im-
mense hinterland of compromise and reformism into which to retreat
from a direct contest for power with the colonial masters. Once the law
and the law-maker — the rulers and the sanction by which they rule —
are thus exonerated, one can settle for minor adjustments to make the
State apparatus perform more smoothly and less offensively. The
adjustments may be sought in the form of additions to the statute book
or of administrative pawns pushed around from square to square. And,
thus, ‘improvement’, that characteristic ideological gift of nineteenth-
century British capitalism, is made to pre-empt and replace the urge
for a revolutionary transformation of society. In Neel Darpan Navinma-
dhab pleads, appropriately enough, for the addition of a dhara
(meaning article* or clause* rather than ‘regulation*, as Madhusudan

7 Harish Mukherjee advised the ryots striedy to abide by the law, even by the
wicked Act XI of 1 860, and to go on begging for redress. ‘I invariably advised
them’, he said, ‘to apply to the district authorities in the proper form for redress
and to go to the next appellate authority if they found no redress at the hands
of the district authorities. I cautioned them against ever committing any
breaches of the peace or committing themselves in any manner by acting illegal-
ly. I explained to them that the operation of the Act was temporary, and that
better measures would be devised next year (RIC 3873 e).

141

Neel Darpan: The Image of a Peasant Rn>olt

translates it) to Act XI to make it hot for the planters [Act III, Sc. 2 ].
Appropriately too, all the planters victims in the play, from landlord
to day labourer, are seen to be discussing the relative merits of good and
bad officials all the time and, taken together, making out a general case
for the Government to substitute wicked magistrates by nice ones.
Fair enough, if this is all that you want out of a massive, well-organized,
armed uprising of the peasantry.

In other words, it is the function of Neel Darpan to generate illusion
about British rule in India as a good thing with only a few minor faults
here and there that can be easily mended. Put so bluntly, it might hurt
libera] sensibilities. These had fed for over a hundred years on its
reputation as predominantly a play of protest. Bankimchandra called
it the Uncle Toms Cabin of Bengal [4: 834] . Priests, professors, and
politicians have been unanimous in their description of the work as
exclusively an indictment of the planters’ tyranny. One has to turn to
the text to see for oneself how partial and misleading such a description
is. For the author’s aversion to the planters is equalled by his reverence
for the Raj. One is a measure of the other. The blacker the planters,
the whiter the regime.

There was nothing self-conti adictory about the mid-ninetcenth-
century liberal being anti-planter and pro-Raj at the same time. A
united front of the sarkar and the baboo against the plan ters was almost
a historical necessity. For by 1860 the predatory phase of British rule
in India was coming to an end. Not many princely vaults remained to
be plundered. Many of the most important strategic annexations had
been already made. Colonialism had by then found its social base
in a neo-feudal class of its own creation and its cultural base in an
emergent middle class capable of combining traditional values with a
received. Western-style enlightenment. Reform had struck roots. The
classes’ were queuing up for BA degrees and jobs. The masses’ went
on fighting until the Htu Mirs and the Dudu Mians, the Sidhus and
the Kanus, the Nana Sahibs and the Tantia Topis had all been driven
out, exiled, hanged, blown up. It was time now for the erstwhile con-
quistador to sctde down nicely and respectably in his estate. In this

1 42 The Small Voice of History

process the indigo planters were of no help at all. On the contrary, they
were an embarrassment. For the consolidation of Britain's power base
in India it was essential that the Government should acquire the image
of a well-run concern based on legality, order, and responsibility. The
planters undermined all these. The Sambad Prabhakar had noted as
early as 1 853 that the planters behaved as if they were above the law
[11: 200 ]. To Edward De-Latour who, as a district official, had seen
the Farazis of Faridpur being goaded into rebellion by the planters, the
latter seemed neither to recognize the existence of a Magistrate on
earth nor a God in heaven [R1C 3977 e]. They flouted the law when-
ever it suited them and openly perverted its processes. Their private
armies weakened the standing of the official law and order at the local
level. Their indulgence in torture, murder, rape, and arson made the
natives question the superiority of the white mans religion, civilization,
and morality. The long-term interests of the Raj, therefore, demanded
that the planters should be disciplined. To the extent that this
perspective was not yet clear to many, if not most, of the junior Europ-
ean officials, they could still be seen to act in collusion with the plant-
ers. But at the higher levels of authority the planters were often
regarded with contempt, although pro-planter pressure groups did
succeed from time to time — as for instance, in the case of Act XI — in
forcing the hands of the Government. On the whole, the anti-planter
agitation had all the official wind in its sails. This is quite clear from
the complicity of the Lieutenant-Governor and the Secretary to the
Bengal Government in the translation, printing, and circulation of
Neel Darpan . In view of this it is difficult to understand Bankimchandras
somewhat belated tribute to its publication as an act of exceptional
courage [4: 825] . The way the author advertises his loyalty throughout
the play makes it quite clear that he had no intention of harming the
prospect of his professional advancement.

In a foreword (left out of Madhusudan s translation) Dinabandhu
defines what he wants his play to achieve. This is to influence the
indigo planters to turn from self interest* to philanthropy so that
Britain’s face could be saved’, for their cruel ways ‘have given the
British a bad name. He condemns their greed, rapacity, and hypocrisy
but notes hopefully ‘the signs of a new dawn of happiness for the ryots’.
These signs are described as follows:

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Neel Darpan: The Image of a Peasant Revolt

The great Queen Victoria, compassionate mother of the projas, con-
siders it improper that her children should be suckled by her wet-
nurses. So she has taken them up in her arms and is feeding them
at her own breast. The even-tempered, wise, courageous and liberal
Mr. Canning has become the Governor-General. T he high-minded
and just Mr. Grant who punishes the wicked, protects the innocent,
and shares with the ryots their weal and woe, has been appointed
Lieutenant-Governor. And truthful, astute, non-partisan officials like
Eden, Herschel and others are gradually coming to blossom as lotuses
in the lake of the civil service. It must, therefore, be clearly evident from
all this that we have an indication now of the great souls mentioned
above taking up soon the Sudarsan disc of justice in order to end the
unbearable misery of the ryots who have fallen into the clutches of the
wicked indigo planters. [15: 1]

This declaration of faith in the ultimate triumph of British justice is
based on the illusion that the law is fair in absolute terms and all one
needs is the fairy godmother of an impartial bureaucracy to make it
available for all. It is a measure of this illusion that the Basu brothers
in Neel Darpan remain unshaken in their faith in the Lieutenant-
Governor and the Commissioner despite the altogether unwarranted
imprisonment of their ageing father. When someone suggests that
the magistrate who sent old Golok Basu to jail is no more wicked than
the Commissioner, Bindumadhab flares up. ‘Sir, he says, you talk
like tins about the Commissioner because you don’t know him well
enough. The Commissioner is very impartial indeed. He cares for the
advancement of the natives.’ He and his brother are both convinced
that the Governor is just on the point of quashing the sentence so that
their father can be set free [Act IV, Sc. 2 ]. The curtain goes up on the
next scene to reveal Golok Basu s corpse hanging in his cell.

In real life, too, we And some of the most radical of the contemporary
liberals charing the same son of illusion. Even Harish Mukherjee
appears to have been enthusiastic about the civil servants as late as
February 1860 when the stage was already ‘set’ for the first round of
jacqueries [14: 149]. Sisirkumar Ghoses despatches to the Hindoo
Patriot document this illusion in detail. In mid-August 1860 he writes
bitterly about the partiality’ of M.G. Taylor, a magistrate recently
posted in Magura. In another despatch next week he talks about

1 44 The Small Voice of History

Mr Taylor having considerably changed’ for the better. His letter of
19 December 1860 is a long catalogue of Taylors misdeeds and it
concludes with the hope that the Lieutenant-Governor, ‘highly spoken
of here’, might be less unheeding ‘to the cries ... of the indigo dis-
tricts’ than his local subordinates \2: 30 , 36, 42 jf\ .

Thus, the liberal looking for perfect justice climbs, toehold by
toehold, the edifice of colonial authority from its sub-divisional
level to its gubernatorial summit. His faith in the morality of colonial
rule survives all the evidence he has of collusion between planters and
civilians and of the resulting perversion of the processes of the law.
These latter are sought ro be explained away as mere aberrations of an
otherwise faultless system. Or, as Dinabandhu Mitra suggests more
than once in his play, there are good sahibs and bad sahibs: the good
ones run the Government and the bad ones run the indigo factories.
Savitri, the Kayastha matron in NeelDarpan , spelt this out in terms of
her own understanding of social distinctions when she described the
planters as the white mens chandals [Act I, Sc. 4\. And in this she
came very close to the distinction that the more sophisticated Tattva-
bodhini Patrika had made a decade ago between 1 bhadra Englishmen
of good character who never took up the indigo trade and ‘the cruel,
abhadra men among them who did [11, II: 129]. Collaboration be-
tween the bhadra Bengalis and the bhadra Englishmen was, clearly, the
need of the hour. In emphasizing this Neel Darpan was simply
upholding an ideological tradition already well established among
our liberals by the middle of the last century.

The urge for collaboration runs through the entire range of Dina-
bandhus literary works. The theme of the British conquest of India
which, for so many of our patriotic writers served as a cue for strident
anti-British declarations, occurs in his Suradhuni Kavya as a vehicle of
loyalism. The sad maiden haunting the grove at Piassey was for him not
a symbol of the loss of Bengal's independence but the fall of the hateful
Mughals [15: 363 f]. The careers of Sirajuddowla and Mir Kasim
provided Girishchandra Ghose with material for seditious plays [12:
39] about the collusion between foreign invaders and native traitors
against Bengali monarchs. Dinabandhu describes Sirajuddowla as a
monster who richly deserved his cruel end [15: 362 f]. And he invests

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Neel Darpan: The Image of a Peasant Revolt

his account of the defeat of Mir Kasims troops and the rescue of the
Nawabs enemy, Krishnachandra Ray, by the British with the aura of
a miracle comparable to the rescue of Bharatchandras Sundar by the
goddess Kali and of Mukundaram s Srimanta by the goddess Chandi
[ 15: 360} . Still another idol of latter-day nationalism — Nana Sahib —
was denounced by him as a brute and a coward, while he was no differ-
ent from any other Bengali baboo of his time in representing the
rebellion of 1857 as a senseless orgy of violence [75: 345]. For, the
permanence of the Raj and the removal of all threat to it were for him
highly desirable ends [75: 443]. And if these attitudes are about the
same as those held by other stalwarts of the Bengal Renaissance, Dina-
bandhu excelled many of them in the obsequiousness with which he
could put these into words. Anyone who wants this confirmed may do
so by turning to his poem, ‘Loyalty Lotus or Rajbhakti Satadal’.
Rendered into English, it reads as follows:

Hail, Alfred, our brother, priceless object of our affection! The de-
scendants of the Aryans are dancing with joy today. For, at this aus-
picious hour on this auspicious day they will all rejoice at the sight of
royalty as they gaze upon your face which is handsome like the moon.
Queen Victoria, our gracious mother, sheds lustre upon the realm as
she manifests herself through you today.

O scion of our Queen, take your seat on this mighty throne. The
Lord of the Universe is thrilled by the beauty of this spectacle. It is after
a lapse of a hundred years that the Queen, our mother, has been so kind
as to send her beloved son to visit her Indian home. With all this display
of affection for her Hindu children who can complain that our mother
remembers us no longer?

A hope dawns irresistibly in our hearts that the Prince, our Emperor-
designate, will, as a gesture of affection and in order to rear his subjects,
bring along with him a venerable woman. An ocean of happiness will
then flood this land of the Hindus. Long live the Prince! Long live the
Prince! Long live the Prince!

And we hope that later on our mother Victoria who is so full of
devotion to God, the Queen who has given birth to heroes and is by
heroes much admired, will herself, together with her family, pay a
happy visit to India with a joyous heart. The multitudes of her subjects
are crying for their mother. She will, when she is here, take them up
in her arms and kiss them.

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The Small Voice of History

Please be seated, brother Duke, among your Hindu brethren. Let
us put a garland of white lotus on your neck. Let us in all affection feed
you with milk, cream, cheese and some delicious motichur as well as
with well-made and seductive chandraputli cakes. And let us offer you
even the tastier gift of love.

Strike up the music on tabla, flute, violin, and sitar. When again
shall we have a joyful day like this? Dress up in your peshwaz , put on
your anklets and dance, O dancing-girl, matching your movements to
the beat of the music. Sing, O singing-girl, such divine tunes as would
excel those heard at Indras court in melody and in rhythm.8

The Prince is holding court with Lord Mayo. Calcutta has been lit
up by the sovereigns lustre. This city, bejewelled with lights, radiates
a glow. To this has been added a glow radiating from the hearts of the
subjects. And pious Hindu women with their moonlike faces are
ululating (as they do on sacred occasions) and decorating their veran-
dahs with earthenware lamps.

The women of Bengal are decorating their homes ingeniously with
traditional designs ( alpana ) as an auspicious measure. With all their
hearts they are engaged in worshipping the King with ceremonial
offerings of fragrant flowers, paddy seeds, and grass. Glory to you, the
women of Bengal, in whom is stored up all that is beneficial: where else
could one find females to equal you in chastity and piety?

Prince has ascended the throne on this highly auspicious day. Who
can now complain that India is unfree? You have now seen this land of
India with your own eyes. You have seen how everything here has dis-
solved in an ocean of joy. On your return to England you can carry with
you the good tidings that the sea of Indian loyalty has indeed flood-
ed over.

What is left to us to set down as an offering at our Queens feet? For,
all that we have already belongs to her. Please accept this loyalty lotus,
the best thing we have in India. Let us melt in sentiments of loyalty.
Let us cry, ‘Victory to Victoria . Let us applaud and rejoice. We have
at last found ourselves in our mother s arms. Cry, ‘Victory to Victoria'.
Cry, ‘Glory to Hari\ [15: 437 f]

We have quoted this poem in extenso not only as a representative
sample of middle-class grovelling but also as a specimen of the canker

8 A god who, according to Hindu mythology, rules over the celestial king-
dom. Many heavenly musicians are patronized by him at his court.

147

Neel Darpan: The Image of a Peasant Revolt

that had eaten into elite nationalism at this early formative stage. Four
out of the above ten stanzas talk of the Hindus and one of ‘the des-
cendants of the Aryans as if they alone constitute the nation. India is,
in fact, identified as the ‘land of the Hindus’, and correspondingly, in
the poem ‘Yuddha [ 1 5:398} , the Musalmans are described as foreigners.
This fragmented nationalism, which excludes millions of Indians
simply because they do not conform to the dominant religion, fits very
well indeed with the parochial character of Dinabandhu Mitra’s
patriotism. At one point he appears to enthuse about the railways as
a unifying factor. On a closer scrutiny, however, this turns out to be no
more than a recognition of the way the railways physically brought
together the peoples of the different parts of India across great dis-
tances [15: 404] . Far from embracing the whole of India, his image of
‘the motherland’ hardly takes in even the whole of his native Bengal.
In ‘Prabasir Bilap’ [7.5: 392 f] his protagonist starts off his lament in
exile promisingly with ‘Oh my native land, the holy land of Bengal’,
but ends up by leaving the reader in no doubt that this Bengal is,
for him, merely the sum of his own village and his family. It is not
surprising therefore that this immature sense of nationhood was gifted
with an equally puerile idea of political independence. Since a member
of the royal family favoured India with a visit, ‘who can now complain
that India is unfree?’

That a writer with such a communal, parochial, and loyalist
outlook should come to be regarded as a great nationalist indicates that
our nationalism has in it an ideological element with a fairly low anti-
imperialist content. This element represents the contribution of that
section of our bourgeoisie who are interested in opposing imperialism
but cannot do so firmly and consistently owing to the historical con-
ditions of their development. So their antagonism is compromised by
vacillation and expresses itself spasmodically. Middle-class Bengalis in
search of a radical tradition, during one such spasm that culminated
in the swadeshi movement, settled on Neel Darpan as a patriotic text
[20: 274\ . We thus got what we deserved: a loyalist play glorified as a
manifesto of petty-bourgeois radicalism.

This had a rather sinister consequence for the historiography of the
indigo rebellion. Adopted by many generations of baboos as a theme
for their literary and artistic self-expression, this peasant revolt came
to acquire the respectability of a patriotic enterprise, led by benevolent

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talukdars like Navinmadhab with peasants likeTorap following them
with all the loyalty, strength, and intelligence of a herd of cattle. (Torap
is in fact likened to a buffalo in Act V, Sc. 2.) The emphasis has thus
been laid on the unity of interest between the village poor and their
native exploiters against a common, foreign enemy. This has helped
to mask the truth about two important aspects of the upper-class
participation in this struggle — first, about the opportunism of the
landed magnates and the fierce contest between them and the peasantry
for the initiative of the struggle against the planters, and secondly,
about the feebleness and defeatism displayed by the people of inter-
mediate means’, that is, the rich peasants and the lesser landlords.

VII

One can hardly expect to understand the character of the upper-class
response to the events of 1 860 unless one is prepared to set aside the
conventional view of the rebellion as an undifferentiated phenomenon.
It is not enough to distinguish between the phases of the struggle in
terms of its progress from lower to higher levels of militancy and orga-
nization, as Suprakash Ray does in his most valuable work on peasant
revolts [ 19:391 f]. What is important is to recognize that in the course
of this development the struggle went through significant changes in
leadership and alignment, too. Ray does not seem to take diese into
account and the rebellion, as described by him, looks like an event with
a uniform social content. Inevitably, as a result of this, he gets entangl-
ed in a number of confusing, if not mutually contradictory, statements
about the nature of landlord and middle-class participation in the
rebellion.

Since the zamindars and big talukdars were the leaders of rural
society, 4it was inconceivable*, according to him, that this class who
were themselves created by the British, would be opposed to the class
of indigo planters who enjoyed the patronage of the British rulers and
ranked with the latter as exploiters. Furthermore, they used to make
a great deal of money by leasing out parts of their estates in patni to
the indigo planters at extremely high rates. It was, therefore, in their
own class interest that they opposed the indigo rebellion [19: 402].
Yet, the evidence of the clash of interests and of arms between zamin-
dars and planters is far too vast and significant to be altogether ignored.

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Neel Darpan: The Image of a Peasant Revolt

Ray himself quotes that some zamindars, urged by a spirit of revenge
and by self-interest, went so far as to organise and lead the rebel peas-
antry’ [19: 394 , 402]. However, he regards this as exceptional, and
concludes that ‘but for a mere handful of the more humanitarian and
vengeful zamindars and big talukdars the entire class of zamindars and
talukdars stood by at a distance as silent onlookers while the peasants
were fighting [19: 402], About the attitude of the middle classes, too,
he is equally categorical. He regards the rural middle classes as ‘reac-
tionary’ and ‘degenerate’, and finds it ‘natural’ that they should have
opposed the rebellion, ‘devoted their utmost efforts to the defence of
indigo cultivation and of their masters, the indigo planters’, and
thereby brought upon themselves the wrath of the rebel peasantry [ 19:
403, 404] . The urban middle classes ‘displayed indifference and
satisfied their sense of duty by a little expression of sympathy from a
distance’ [ 19: 404\ , although there were among them some ‘liberal and
humanitarian’ individuals like Harish Mukherjee and Dinabandhu
Mitra who, according to him, were progressive’ and came out ‘more
or less’ in support of the peasant struggles [19: 188]. Here again, the
burden of his conclusion appears to be that ‘the middle classes, far from
joining in the rebellion as a class, opposed it and helped the indigo
planters in various ways’ [ 19: 389] .

Two points thus emerge from these statements: first, that the landed
and the middle classes were in gene ral opposed to the indigo rebellion,
and secondly, that such opposition was altogether consistent with the
interests and outlook of these classes, so that any act or expression of
sympathy for the rebels on the part of individual members of these
classes must be regarded as exceptional. Both these points merit serious
consideration not merely because they occur in what is unquestionably
the most important work published so far on Indian peasant revolts,
but also because they are representative of an influential and widely
held view.

To turn first to the question of upper- and middle-class participation
in the indigo rebellion, it would appear in the light of contemporary
accounts that Suprakash Ray has grossly underestimated it: 1860 was
a well-documented year. Thanks to the passions that scored it, we have
been left with a vast amount of evidence originating from parliamentary,
administrative, missionary, journalistic, and literary sources. Taken
together it clearly testifies to the fact that the support offered by the

1 50 The Small Voice of History

zamindars, talukdars, and the rural middle classes to the rebel peasantry
was far from fortuitous, rare, or negligible.

Long before the rebellion of 1860 armed clashes between the
zamindars and the white planters had come to be established as a
notorious and recurrent feature of life in the indigo districts. The
Tattvabodhini Patrika mentioned this in 1850 as a most familiar
phenomenon and quoted an instance dating back to the middle of that
decade when a fierce battle of staves’ fought ‘between the private army
of a planter and that of a Muslim landlord in Krishnanagar’ had
resulted in the killing and wounding of many on both sides and the
drowning of four to five hundred heads of cattle belonging to the ryots
[77, II: 130 n\. The Sambad Prabhakar in two of its leading articles
in 1 853 and 1854 regarded violent disputes between zamindars and
planters as fairly widespread throughout Bengal [77, 1: 98, 200], These
were common enough to be treated as typical by Peary Chand Mitra
in his novel, Alaler Gharer Dulal , published in 1858. Its debauched
and accident-prone hero has a pleasure trip to his zamindari estate
rudely spoilt by an affray between the lath ials of his own cutcherry and
those led by the manager of the local indigo factory [76: 79-82]. The
planters are being increasingly oppressive in Jessore, says the author.
Subsequently that year the Hindoo Patriot echoed the same concern
and went on to record its appreciation of the zamindars siding with
their ryots against the planters [14: 118 &n38].

By 1860, as the revolt broke out in earnest, it appeared at least
during its initial stages as if zamindari feud and peasant jacquerie
had merged into a common resistance. A large number of the landed
magnates — far in excess of the two families who come up for mention
by Suprakash Ray [ 19: 402] — became actively involved in the struggle
against the planters. The most formidable of them all was Ramratan
Ray of Narail. His enmity towards the planters and the spectacular
ways in which he expressed it became legendary. He was said to have
destroyed an indigo factory and covered up the traces by transplanting
a coconut orchard onto its site— all done in a single night s work [22:
l4f]. He owned extensive properties in Jessore, Faridpur, and Pabna,
and in each of these districts his lathials fought the planters mercenaries
[14: 87 J. In 1860 the rebel peasants of Kushtia enjoyed his active
support and patronage. Insurgents in a Pabna village who chased away

Neel Darpan: The Image of a Peasant Revolt 1 5 1

a party of policemen headed by a Deputy Magistrate were reported
to have been led by one of his agents [14: 156 f]. And later on that
summer the lathials of the Narail zamindars fought a pitched battle
against those of the Meerganj concern [2: 24 1], In most of these
exploits Ramratan Ray had a powerful accomplice in his naib» Mahesh
Chatterjee. It would be wrong, however, to regard the latter s opposition
to the planters as merely derivative. He was a big zamindar in his own
right and owned much property in the neighbourhood of the Katchi-
katta factory in Nadia [RIC 2921 e ]. By the middle of February 1860
we find him stirring up the Katchikatta ryots against the planters [RIC
31 1 1 el. Soon afterwards a complaint was lodged against him and his
naib for inciting the villagers of Pachlia against the Poamaree concern
and organizing a murderous assault on one of its employees [2: 12-
15\. By the end of March he had already been blacklisted by the Dis-
trict Magistrate as ‘the most dangerous agitator in Nadia [ 14: 87 nil].
Another officer of the same district testifying before the Indigo Com-
mission accused Mahesh Chatterjee of holding nightly meetings
where he exhibited parwanas hostile to indigo cultivation and of
dissuading the ryots from sowing and encouraging them to re-
fuse to allow the factory servants to enter the villages’ [RIC 3071 e\.
By April he was being blamed by the guardians of law and order
for masterminding the Pabna riots against the planters on behalf of
Ramratan Ray [14: 157 f]. The Pal Chaudhuris of Ranaghat, too,
counted among the leaders of the landlord opposition. They had never
been reconciled to the presence of European planters in western
Jessore, where they had their extensive zamindaris. Their Ranaghat
home often served as a rendezvous for the anti-planter landlords of the
region [14: 89]. Shyam Chandra Pal Chaudhuri had a long-standing
feud with Robert Larmour of Mulnath, the notorious General Mufassii
Manager of the Bengal Indigo Company. Lathials of the two parties
had already clashed as early as January 1858. Two years later, in January
and February 1860, a number of affrays occurred between them again
[14: 90] . Another redoubtable enemy of the planters among the Jessore
zamindars was Mathur Acharya of Shadooty (Sadhuhati). A report
from Sisir Ghose to the Hindoo Patriot in October 1860 mentioned
that ‘the villagers with Mothoor at their head threw off the factory yoke
during the late crisis’ and that the planter was trying to persuade the

152

The Small Voice of History

authorities to send up to Shadooty a battalion of police for his own
protection [2:41 f). According to Satishchandra Mitra, the Acharyas
sided with the peasantry and incited and organized them’ into a force
of 30,000 men who easily overpowered the planter s retainers and
plundered the houses of the factory employees [19: 394 ]. Yet another
zamindar who allied himself for a while with the indigo ryots was
Brindaban Sarkar ofSibnibas. The Sarkais had been involved in along-
drawn litigation with Larmour over the ownership of Sibnibas. Dur-
ing the very early stages of the rebellion they incited the ryots against
the planter and helped them with advice and money to the extent of
paying off the fines imposed by the courts on those found guilty of
violation of Act XI of 1860 [14: 90 f;RlC2\7 2-7 4 e]. Then there was
Jagadbandhu Ghose, a zamindar who, in the spring of 1860, was
directly responsible for provoking a revolt among the ryots of the
Aurangabad concern in a manner that had some unforeseen consequence
(as noticed below). Subsequently that summer Sisir Ghose sent up to
the Hindoo Patriot a story about a great battle . . . fought at Mullickpore
between the owner of the villages and John MacArthur of Meergunge
[2: 16\. The owner mentioned above was Haranath Ray, zamindar of
Mallikpur. Srihari Ray of Chandipur, too, a proprietor of seven vil-
lages, took a conspicuous part in the rebellion, according to Satish-
chandra Mitra 1 19:391]. So, it appears, did Prankrishna Pal, identified
by James Forlong of the Nischindipur factory as an influential
zamindar and an enemy of the planters who had been trying ‘to induce
the ryots not to sow indigo and to sow a large breadth of rice culti-
vation [RIC 56 e\. Two other landlords, Ramnidhi Chatterjee and
Nabokisto Pal, both big talukdars, are also named by Forlong as active
and powerful opponents [RIC2924 c, 2925 e, 3505 e). This rollcall is
necessarily incomplete. But I do not think it is possible to regard this
as indicative of anything but a fairly large participation of the landed
magnates in the rebellion during its earlier stages.

As for the middle classes, the distinction between an urban section
‘somewhat sympathetic’ to the rebellion and a rural one hostile to it,
is perhaps a bit too neatly drawn. Physically as well as culturally, town
and country still formed a smooth continuum during the middle de-
cades of the nineteenth century: physically, because the metropolis
shaded off into the deep country7 by degrees along a gradient of

153

Ned Darpan: The Image of a Peasant Revolt

suburban villages and rural towns; and culturally, because the metro-
politan society itself was still subject to a strong rural pull* as the
nouveauxriches’vn Calcutta and its suburbs continued to cherish all the
more important traditional values, while the ancestral village continued
to exert a spiritual influence even on the new generation which had
grown almost entirely on urban soil* [22: 12, 63, 79, 80, 85]. It is,
therefore, difficult to agree with Suprakash Ray that the division of
the middle classes between those who were ‘permanently resident in
the country’ and the rest, predominantly resident in towns’, corres-
ponded to a general division between a 'relatively reactionary section
and a progressive’ one [19: 188, passim] . And this was true of attitudes
relating to social reform as well as to politics. The middle classes, in
town and country, were all equally attached to the Raj. If anything, the
Calcutta baboos, judging by the noisy display of their solicitude for
their guardians’ in 1 857, appeared to be quite capable of outshouting
their mufassil class brethren in protestations of loyalty. Again, if
sympathy for a peasant revolt (not to be confused with pity for the
victims of repression after a rebellion has been crushed) is any measure
of a progressive outlook, the urban middle classes could hardly be
credited with it. Thus, the revolt of the Santals, the other big uprising
of the decade just ended, proved to be a cause for much concern to the
Somprakash, identified by Benoy Ghose as ‘an organ of the educated
and liberal Bengalis of intermediate means during the second half
of the nineteenth century [//, IV: 25]. One of its correspondents
reported how a great fear spread among the rich rural gentry as in a
particular area the rebels approached the neighbourhood, while,
editorially, the Somprakash pleaded with the authorities to garrison the
small towns so that the insurgents were contained in the jungle until
the cold season when the troops might enter it and deal with them [ 1 1,
IV: 790, 791]. The Sambad Bhaskar, edited by Gourishankar Bhatta-
charya, who in his youth had learnt the art of liberal journalism as an
assistant at the Jnananveshan , the organ of the Young Bengal ‘ultras’,
was worried that ‘the Muslim infidels of Bihar were spreading a
rumour to the effect that the Santal insurrection would soon force
the British Government out of power’, and that the Kols, too, felt
encouraged to take up arms against the Government, thanks to ‘the
mild manner’ in which the latter had treated the Santals [11, III: 34,

1 54 The Small Voice of History

298, 300]. Residence in towns could, thus, hardly be an influence
on middle-class opinion in favour of a peasant revolt, particularly if
the latter bore even the least tinge of disloyalty to the Raj. For, as
the milkman in Neel Darpan put it, ‘The city baboos are pro-British’
[Act V, Sc. 1],

This, however, is not to deny that some elements of rural society
who had, customarily, stood between peasant and landlord, fed as
parasites on the latter’s resources and been the agents of his tyranny
over the ryots, were now in the planters’ employment and sided with
them against the enemies of the factory. Already in 1850 the Tattva-
bodhini Patrika had noticed the presence of ‘a community of ruffians
engaged at many places in the countryside in oppressing the people’
under the planters’ patronage [11, II: 129]. They were still there, a
continuing scourge, when the Somprakash wrote bitterly about them
fourteen years later [11, IV: 80 ]. The characters Dewan, Khalasi, and
Amin, represent them in Neel Darpan. The khalasi has considerably
added to his authority by allowing the junior planter to sleep with his
sister [Act III, Sc. /]. But the amin who also made a gift of his sister
to the sahebs, has not been promoted to the post he had expected as
a fair return [Act I, Sc. 2], The dewan laments that his services are not
appreciated enough, although he has allowed himself to sink, morally,
to the lowest depths in order to do his master’s bidding. Yet he is
determined not to shrink from anything, however base, for ‘once I have
taken up this job’, he assures his boss, ‘I haven’t been the least swayed
by any consideration of fear, shame, timidity, honour, or prestige; in-
cendiarism, cow slaughter, and the slaying of brahmans and women
have all become habitual with me’ [Act I, Sc. 3].

.Suprakash Ray has quite rightly emphasized the role of these cor-
rupt elements as the planters’ henchmen [19: 403 f]. But here again
one must be careful not to oversimplify. There were, indeed, some
outstanding cases of die planters’ own managerial staff turning against
them and actively participating in the rebellion or even leading it.
Morad Biswas who led the Aurangabad rebels up to a point, had for
some time acted as a rent collector for the factory which his men were
to attack later on [ 14: 94] . The Mallik brothers, Ramraian, Rammohan,
and Girish, who led the insurgents in Jessore, had all been factory
karmacharis [14: 96] . And, Digambar and Bishnucharan Biswas,

155

Neel Darpan: The Image of a Peasant Revolt

whose reputation as leaders of the rebellion became legendary, had also
served as senior employees of the Bansberia Concern [14: 95]* What
is even more important to recognize is that the rural middle class was
by no means coterminous with the group of factory karmacharis. It
consisted of two very large sections of the rural population. First, there
were many small landholders including jotedars, talukdars, and maha-
jans who obviously belonged to this category. Not all of them were
friendly with the planters. It was they who petitioned the Lieutenant
Governor during his tour in 1 859 seeking his intervention against the
tyranny of William White of the Bansberia Concern [14: 76 f]* It was
the opposition of these small landholders which the planters, Maurice
Tweedie and Adam Hume Smith, complained of in their evidence
before the Indigo Commission [#/C3409> 3494]. Some of the most
formidable leaders of the rebellion came from this class. There were
the Biswases of Poragachha, minor landlords and moneylenders,9
who organized, armed, and financed the insurgents [ 14: 95 f; 19:386,
390 f]. Then there were the Malliks of Jayrampur whose anti-planter
sentiments received much encouragement from the Pal Chaudhuris
of Ranaghat [14: 89 ]. The manner of their militant opposition to
the planters earned for Ramratan, the head of the family, the heroic
sobriquet ‘Nana Sahcb of Bengal* [14: 96 f]. Sisir Ghose, too, came
from a middle-ranking talukdari family. Unlike the other talukdars
mentioned above he wielded the pen rather than the lathi against the
factories at the height of the rebellion [2: 22 ff, 28 , 30 , 36; 19: 220 ,
389, 397, 402] . He was, indeed, a member of that small but increasingly
important section of the rural madhyabitta who combined landed
interests and country connections with a Western-style education and
a libera] professional training acquired in the cities. Operating from
the rural towns and the larger villages, they constituted a vital link
between the indigo ryots and Calcutta public opinion. It is they who
acted as Harish Mukherjee s eyes and ears, for the editor of the Hindoo
Patriot had never been to any of the indigo districts himself except
Barasat and Hugh [RIC 3876 e] * No wonder that they were not popu-
lar with the planters and their friends among the local bureaucrats.

9 Suprakash Ray describes them once as middle class’ [19: 389] and then
again as primarily peasants’ [19: 390]*

1 56 The Small Voice of History

According to Sisir Ghose, members of ‘the anti-indigo party* blacklisted
by the Jessorc authorities in July 1 860 included, among others, a court
official, a postmaster, a teacher, and three other educated natives for
all of whom the gravest consequences were predicted if the law could
lay its hands on them [2; 22 f].

Apart from these junior representatives of the rural gentry endowed
with talukdaris and/or a little Western-style education — the bhadrasan -
tans whose distress had provoked a protest in the correspondence
column of the Sambad Prabhakar in the summer of 1859 [11, I:
105 f] — there was still another section of the non-urban middle
classes whose attitudes must be taken into account. These were the
rich peasants who, acting as modols (or, more elegantly, mandals , i.e.
headmen) occupied a strategic position both in indigo production and
in village society.10 Benoy Chowdhury draws upon a contemporary
account of the role and resources of these elements to conclude that the
planter found them eminently useful in enforcing his system’, and the
modols, thanks to their triple function as principal tenants, money-
lenders, and leaders of the local community of ryots, misappropriated
the peasants’ surplus’ as the reward of their collaboration [5: 769 f).
A pucca house adorned with a string of golahs (granaries) for rice was
the visible symbol of a headman s affluence in a village in the indigo
districts. But the collaboration was short-lived and the planters by
their rapacity alienated this useful section of the middle classes, too. A
modol family mentioned in the opening scene of Neel Darpan owned
not so long ago ten ploughs, forty to fifty bullocks, a massive cowshed,
a big courtyard, a large annual crop of monsoon paddy, and money
enough to provide sixty meals a day for its members and dependants.
But within less than three years after the planters had acquired a lease
of the village, the family was altogether ruined: two of the three broth-
ers, who were severely beaten up by the men of the factory for refusing
to change over from rice to indigo, had fled the village, and the other
was about to do so. It was oppression of this sort that drove the rich

10 To make doubly clear what should be quite obvious to the reader at this
point, the demographic difference between the total rural population and the
sum of all bigzamindars, big talukdars, middle peasants, poor peasants, landless
peasants, agricultural labourers, bandits, vagabonds, and lumpen constitutes
for us the ‘rural middle classes’ in 1860.

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Neel Darpan: The Image of a Peasant Revolt

peasants throughout the indigo districts to make common cause with
the rest of the peasantry against the planters in 1 860. More often than
not it was they who emerged at the flashpoint of a local insurrection
as its grassroots leaders inciting, leading, and organizing the ryots. In
Lai Behari Days Bengal Peasant Life it is the intervention of the
mandal who seemed to be somewhat better dressed than the rest and
to exercise some sort of authority over the assembly’, that swayed
village opinion decisively in favour of action against the planter, Mr
Murray. 4 Mari salake marol (Strike the scoundrel Murray) — that
should be our battlecry, he exhorts. ‘The indigo planters have been the
ruin of our country. Before those salas came, this country was as happy
as Ayodhya in the time of Rama. But now everything has gone to rack
and ruin. They oppress us; they beat us; they imprison us; they torture
us; they dishonour our wives and daughters. Down with the blue
monkeys! Mari salake maroV [10: 247\, All contemporary observers
testified to the rich peasant s oppositional role as indicated by Day in
his novel. Herschel, the highly knowledgeable Nadia official, claimed
to know of ‘hundreds’ of village headmen who had acted as the focal
leaders of the insurgents [RJC 2832 e]. And for Blair Kling, a modern
historian of the ‘Blue Mutiny , the evidence is ample and eloquent
enough to allow him to state ‘that the village headmen or mandals
whose names appear as leaders in the indigo disturbances are too
numerous to recite’ [14: 97\.

VIII

It should be clear from all this that the indigo rebellion, which was
primarily the work of the great majority of the villagers ranging from
middle peasants to the rural proletariat, was still not without parti-
cipants, and occasionally leaders and organizers, drawn from classes
above that level. But those upper-class elements consisting of zamindars,
talukdars, and rich peasants, although they opposed the planters up to
a point, did not do so all for quite the same reason as the rest of the rural
society. Their resistance differed from that of their poorer neighbours
in its aims as well as in its quality.

Let us turn to the landed magnates again. Rabindranath Tagpre
retailed a myth about the zamindars rescuing the ryots from ‘the
usurious noose’ by which it was the planters’ policy to try and hang

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them [23: 342], The truth is that the big landlords were quite happy
to let the white planters do what they liked with the ryots so long as
they did not themselves feel threatened. The poets grandfather,
Dwarakanath Tagore, earned some at least of his princely fortune from
bargains made with the planters [RIC 3997 e] . He was emphatically in
favour of ‘the cultivation of indigo and the residence of Europeans’ as
a result of which, he claimed, ‘the ryots materially improved in their
condition.* And it was as a token of the white seigneurs’ coexistence
with the brown ones that he was quoted by the former in their mem-
orial to the Secretary of State in defence of the indigo system [17: 44
/]. But the era of mutual tolerance, never altogether free of feuds, was
not destined to last long. Dwarakanath s death in 1 846 may be said to
have symbolized its end. The Union Bank crashed the following year.
As capital dried up, the rush to acquire more land for indigo, which
had already started in 1829 and considerably intensified since 1837,
developed into a scramble. It was the ryots, inevitably a marauder’s first
kill, who were hurt most as the wicked weed fought, burnt and litigated
its way into paddy fields, residential plots, country paths, and the
borders of village ponds — lands no tyrant had ever laid his hands on.
The zamindars cashed in on the peasants’ distress. The landholders
knew that the planters could not do wi thout their land. This ‘immensely
strengthened their bargaining position.’ This comment, by a modern
historian [5: 166\ , on the venality of the zamindars is confirmed by the
views of many contemporary observers including some who testified
before the Indigo Commission. Among these were Maurice Tweedie
of the Loknathpur factory, who was no friend of the native landlords
f/?/C3407 e], Mahesh Chatterjee who, as noticed above, was no friend
of the planters [RIC 3526 e], and James Forlong, a liberal planter
friendly to both sides [14: 27, 5 9f] . ‘While I have been in the district’,
said Forlong after thirty years’ residence in Krishnanagar, ‘I have never
yet found a zamindar hesitate in handing over his ryots to the planter
as soon as his terms are complied with’ [RIC 2902 e]. It is the near un-
animity of all on this point which led the Commission to conclude
‘that the only difficulty experienced by the planter has been that of
settling the pecuniary terms’ with the landlord concerned in a dispute,
and that ‘in any case there is usually but one termination to these
disputes’, that is an agreement on ‘the price demanded for a putni or
‘the bonus demanded for a lease’ [RIC 42-3 r].

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Neel Darpan: The Image of a Peasant Revolt

But an agreement was often not so easy to reach. The landlords
would try to exact ‘the largest possible rental and the largest possible
price* [RIC 2917 e], anything up to four times the annual rental as the
price of a patniy amounts ranging from 25 to 1 00 per cent as the selami
for an ijara , and so on [5: 776 f]. Only the larger indigo concerns
backed by the agency houses could afford to buy on such terms, and
even they found their resources badly strained when the failure of the
Union Bank made funds hard to come by. And thus as the normal
procedure of buying and selling was hindered by a shortage of credit,
both parties were tempted to use non-economic measures of persua-
sion. The zamindar would try to force his own terms for a lease on the
planter by inciting the ryots against him. The planter, on his part,
would use the obliging and sinister authority of the local police and the
courts in order to bully the landlord into a settlement favourable to
himself. If such devices failed, they would directly resort to violence
and allow the question of prices and perquisites to be decided by
combats between their respective bands of lathials and spearmen.

The use of such non-economic measures was, in a certain sense,
appropriate for these transactions. For, what was at issue here was not
just a price regulated by demand and supply, but feudal rights of access
to the peasants land and labour. The zamindars of Bengal already en-
joyed these rights which they used, until 1829, to stop the planters
from contracting directly with the ryots for indigo [14: 52], and after
that date to boost their bargaining power in deals over patnis and ijaras
in the manner mentioned above. Inevitably, therefore, during the three
decades preceding the rebellion and particularly after 1 837 when legal
restraints on the acquisition of property were all removed, the planters
intensified their drive to acquire and expand their ilaka (proprietary)
estates where they could get the ryots to grow indigo without having
to go through the zamindars as in be-ilaka (non-proprietary) areas. An
ilaka offered the planters a twofold advantage. First, they could deve-
lop the cultivation of indigo here on a traditional ryoty pattern based
on small peasant holdings worked by family labour. This considerably
reduced the managerial costs and the uncertainties of labour supply
which made the plantation type of agriculture in nijabad lands
unattractive for them [5: 124-30] . Their preference showed up clearly
in the fact that by 1860 for every bigha of nijabad growing indigo
in Lower Bengal there were almost as many as three bighas of ryoty

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[RIC 1 a]. Secondly, ilaka cultivation equipped the European planters
with socio-political powers over the peasantry on a par with those held
by the native landlords. This was recognized by all concerned — by the
Government, by the planters themselves and, of course, by their rivals
the zamindars. A Midnapur official pointed this out in 1855 when he
observed that by securing the proprietary right in the land where his
future operations are to be carried on the planter obtains power over
the ryots’ [5: 166\. The planters’ view was represented, among others,
by James Forlong of the Nischindipur factory. He preferred ilaka be-
cause, he told the Indigo Commission, ‘the authority of the zamindar
seemed to me to be the only authority possessing any practical charac-
ter whatever as to rights over the people’. Pressed further by the Com-
mission to state whether these ‘rights’ constituted feudal power, he
answered in the affirmative [RIC 54 e, 65 e\. The consensus in favour
of such power had, by 1 860, led the planters to acquire vast proprietary
estates throughout the indigo districts. A little over 77 per cent of all
land growing indigo for the Bengal Indigo Company was ilaka; so was
nearly 74 per cent of the area under James Hills’s concerns [14: 53 f].
It was inevitable, therefore, that expansion on this scale should end
up in clashes between planter and zamindar. The zamindar felt that
the planter operating independently of him in the neighbourhood was
a challenge to his own authority over the peasantry. Disputes between
their servants exacerbated feelings on both sides. The ryots often
sought the zamindar s protection against the planter’s brutalities, while
the zamindar would not hesitate to use armed bands of ryots to dis-
courage a planter from intruding into lands he owned or coveted. All
such conflicts, as noticed in the Report of the Indigo Commission [ RIC
41 r], were characteristic of the rivalry between an established feudal
magnate and an aspiring one. No wonder that these were widespread
in areas where the planters had expanded most, such as Nadia, where
they set up as landlords over two-thirds of the district [14: 55].

This acute and often violent contest for ‘feudal power explains
much of the landlord opposition that merged up to a point with the
resistance of the peasantry in 1 860. Yet this opposition was by its very
nature limited. W,J. Herschel, Magistrate of Krishnanagar, was quite
accurate in his observation that the principal zamindars did on the
whole’ throw their weight into the scale against the planters, but by no

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means to the extent they could have done [RIC 1833 e] . The limitations
of the landlords' involvement in the rebellion showed up in a number
of ways. There were those who, like Srigopal Pal Chaudhuri, intrigued
and sympathized with Ramratan Mallik and other rebel leaders against
the planters, but would not refuse them leases or defy them openly in
any other way for fear of expensive and protracted 1 itigation [RIC 3551
e]. It is this prospect of harassment generated by long-drawn judicial
processes and by the partisan intervention of the local officials that
made even such inveterate foes of the planters as Ramratan Ray and
Mahesh Chatterjee weaken sometimes [RIC 3526 e] or withdraw
temporarily from a confrontation [RIC35\6e]. Even Math urAcharya,
who once led a miniature peasant army against the factories, chose
after some time to act as a mediator between planters and ryots and
persuaded the latter to disarm [ 19: 394] . And we have it again on the
authority of the knowledgeable Mr Herschel that Robert Larmour,
once the hete noire of the Pal Chaudhuris of Ranaghat, owed a great
deal to the ultimate assent of the two principal zamindars, Sham
Chunder Pal Chowdhury and Habib ul Hossain' [RIC 2834 e] for the
suppression of the rebel peasantry.

Common to all these retreats and betrayals was a logic of proprietary
interests which led the native zamindars to go along with the ryot so
long as he refused to grow indigo but back out the moment he decided
to defy the planter-landlord by withholding rents. The development
of the struggle against indigo into a rent strike is thus of immense
importance for the history of the rebellion. It was, however, the in-
evitable consequence of the planters' accession to zamindaris. This
equipped them with the power to impose advances on the ryots and
enforce the cultivation of indigo in a manner they could never hope to
do in be-ilaka villages thanks to the constant and capricious interference'
of the native landlords [RIC 2928 e]. As a district official observed in
1 859, it was compulsory' for the ryots in ilaka areas to accept advances
for indigo [5: 166], The procedure for compulsion consisted, first, of
a planter's use of the power of summoning ryots to increase his indigo
cultivation [RIC 2607 e]. Once forced into the planter's presence, the
ryot could be coerced in a variety of ways ranging from blackmail to
bastinado to contract for indigo. The pressure that often told most was
the threat of a rent increase [5: 168] . It was stepped up after the failure

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of the Union Bank in December 1847 when, in conditions of a re-
duced supply of capital, the planters became ‘more careful in collecting
arrears of rent from the peasants [5: 194]. In the absence of a law
enabling them to choose crops for the ryots to grow the planters fell
back on their right to increase rents as the next best inducement in
favour of indigo. An unobliging tenant could always be charged a
higher rental and be thrown out foi not paying it. It is not that en-
hancement and eviction actually took place on a large scale [5: 182].
The threat was often enough to break down an individual peasants
opposition. To press a ryot for rents was to press him for indigo. Or,
as the planters would say, ‘When we settle for rent we settle for indigo'
[5: 189]. The intensity of their feeling against the Rent Act of 1859
(Act X), which appeared to curb their power of enhancement (though
in reality it did not, as the planters were soon to recognize), was indeed
a clear indication of the value they put on it as an instrument of their
‘practical authority’ in the ilaka areas [5: 187; RIC 2266 e, 2932-3 e].
Thus, the increasing use of rent as a lever to impose indigo on the
ryots forced the latter to react to this, inevitably, as a concomitant evil.
As a result, what had been so far a resistance to indigo began to take
on the shape of a rent strike too. Thus began the ‘rent disturbances’
which, as Kling explains, was the official description for the refusal of
the ryots who were tenants-at-will to submit to eviction from lands
claimed by planters’ [14: 173]. Although this aspect of the rebellion
became most pronounced after September 1 860, that is, during the
period immediately following the publication of Neel Darpan , it had
already made an impact earlier that spring as a growing and potent
element of class antagonism which could hurt all landlords, white as
well as brown. Some of the latter who knew how to read the signs,
started immediately to decelerate on their collision course. Jagadbandhu
Ghose made his peace with the Aurangabad concern by March 1 860;
Mahesh Chatterjee, too, withdrew to Calcutta that spring; Shyam
Chandra Pal Chaudhuri negotiated a truce with his enemy Robert
Larmour by the summer of 1860 [14: 88, 90, 92]. For, a tocsin had
been sounded in the ilaka areas for all to hear. As early as March the
peasants of north-western Jessorc had gone on a rent strike against the
planter-zamindars of the Joradah concern. And within three months
it spread to the Salmagudia concern in southern Pabna and from there
to the northern part of that district and to Jessore, Nadia, and western

Neel Darpan: The Image of a Peasant Revolt 1 63

Faridpur [14: 773]. By autumn rents emerged as the central issue of
the conflict between planters and ryots, and the rebellion assumed the
character of a struggle fought more closely than before on class lines.

An important feature of this later and more determined phase of
rebellion was the increasing solidarity of the poorer sections of villages.
It is not merely the tenant-cultivators who were tyrannized by the
planters. Poor and landless peasants, hired for an assortment of jobs
connected with the transport of the indigo crop and with the making
of the dye [14: 29\y were also subjected to iniquities of all kinds. They
had, of course, their share of the physical brutalities, the regime of the
shyamchand, which the planters and their myrmidons inflicted on
all and sundry.1 1 Equally, if not more, galling was fact that they were
underpaid for their labour. An editorial in the Samhad Prabhakar of
1 2 March 1 860 noted how a rising cost of living had been pushing up
agricultural industrial wages for all except those employed by the
factories. Consequently, ‘the peasants of Nadia have united in a strike
[ekatra hoia dharmaghat sthapan kariachche] determined not to work
for the planters for unremunerative wages.’ The Prabhakar went on to
describe the intensity of local feeling thus: ‘In certain villages the
peasants have built up such a solidarity among themselves that even the
servants of the factories, however armed with lathis, dare not confront
them* [ 1 1 , 1: 1 12 f ] . A most remarkable fact about this solidarity is that
it appears to have cut across the ethnic division between the local poor
and the tribal poor — the so-called buna coolies brought over annually
in large numbers from the districts of Bankura, Birbhum or the South-
West Frontier Agency [R1C 24 r] to serve as a cheap labour force for
the planters. We have nothing on record ro show that the tribal
labourers participated in any armed action during the rebellion. But
there are some clear indications that they, too, were caught up in the
spirit of the dharmaghat against ill-paid work. A letter to the English-
man (7 June 1 860) from a Jessore planter complained of the ‘ingratitude9
of the tribal workers for demanding an advance of five rupees and a

11 The Tattvabodhini Patrika wrote in 1850: ‘It is not merely the peasants
who are subjected to coercion and punishment by the planters and their hench-
men; the same treatment is meted out also to those who transport the indigo
leaves by cart or boat or on their heads and do any other work of this kind’
[77. II: 128].

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The Small Voice of History

monthly wage of five rupees as against the customary advance of two
rupees and an equally low wage per month. Less than two-thirds of
the usual number of tribal labourers had turned up to work for him
[ 14: 166f\ . That they were no great friends of the planters, but, on the
contrary, ready to sympathize with their opponents, is also indicated
by Navinmadhab in Neel Darpan when, after rescuing Kshetramoni,
he decides to take the path that leads through the tribal quarter of the
village as the safest escape route, because the tribals, he is sure, will do
us no harm if they come to know what has happened* [Act III, Sc. 3\.

Solidarity of this kind between the poorer sections of the rural
population contrasted sharply, at this particular point of the rebellion,
with the increasing dissociation between the militant peasants and the
landed magnates. The latter had already, as noticed above, started
back-pedalling. This had sometimes a most disastrous consequence
for the rebels, particularly when they failed to sustain a struggle all on
their own and looked up to the big landlords for leadership. What
could happen in such cases is illustrated by a story published by both
the Hindoo Patriot and the Sambad Prabhakar in January 1 860 [ 1 1, 1:
109-12]. The peasants of Goahpota, Shyamnagar, and Badochuluri,
three small villages in Nadia district, were subjected continuously to
a series of harassments by the gomasta of a local indigo factory until
their patience ran out and they banded together, beat up the planters*
henchmen, and rescued from their custody a village headman and an
aged ryot who had been quite unjustly put under arrest. On hearing
about these incidents, the European chief of the Bhajanghata factor
decided to try and bully the villagers into submission. So he paraded
through the area with a posse of lathials and ordered the modols of each
village to report to him at the local factory, which they refused to do.
Defied thus, the planter immediately lodged a false complaint to the
local magistrate alleging that the ryots had raided the houses of the
Europeans and robbed them. Not content with invoking the law in his
favour, he also hired a contingent of fifty spearmen from Jessore and
began systematically to spread terror in the neighbourhood. ‘But what
could the solidarity of the villagers hope to achieve by itself?* asks the
Sambad Prabhakar. ‘For they were all poor and of course, no one ever
comes forward to help the poor. They became very scared indeed for
having been involved thus in a dispute with the planter. So they con-
ferred among themselves and decided that they must have someone

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Neel Darpan: The Image of a Peasant Revolt

who was wealthy enough to be able to protect them.* The person whom
they begged for help was Brindaban Pal Sarkar, a big zamindar who
owned a large number of villages in the area. He refused to help be-
cause, he said, he had far too many quarrels of his own with the planters
to take over other people s disputes. Thus ended the hope the villagers
had of securing help from affluent quarters and, as a result, they lost
heart. They appealed to the magistrate, but to no avail. And yet the
planters had no difficulty in persuading the same guardian of the law
to sanction the employment of two dozen armed guards for the
protection of the gomasta whose misdeeds had actually triggered off
these troubles. Eventually, the ryots who had by this time lost all hope
and could no longer bear up with oppression, presented themselves in
a body to the planter one day and asked for his forgiveness.’ The planter
responded by imposing on the three villages a collective fine of Rs 300
in addition to an equal amount they were obliged to pay to the gomasta
as the price of peace. The story ends by noting that these villagers are
now altogether subservient to the planter and bear up, heads bent, with
all his ukases.'

All this was in 1858. When, subsequently, the rebellion breaks out,
we find the peasants in a more aggressive and resolute mood. W.J.
Herschels summary of violent incidents, appended to the Report of the
Indigo Commission , offers some insights into the insurgents* temper.
Case no. 62. Government vs. Muniruddin Biswas and 22 others , may be
cited as a typical instance:

Resistance to the Police. A petition was sent to the Darogah of Bagda
byoneofMr. Larmours people to say that, on thei r going to Barakhan-
pore, they were driven out by the villagers; the Darogah went to the
spot, saw the Naib reading the Parwana and Proclamation of March
29 and April 9 to 25 ryots. They laughed at it and swore not to obey
it; the ringleaders, four, were arrested and presently rescued by a party
of lathials, two hundred. Subsequently the Military Police under the
Magistrate (Mr. Macneile) arrested 1 8 men and one more was next day
arrested and identified. [RIC 1 1 a]

This militancy was informed with a sense of independence which the
Hindoo PatriothaA already noted, disapprovingly, in 1 854 as a product
of the growing estrangement* between ryots and zamindars — ‘their
natural heads’ [ 5 : 200], When by the spring of 1 860 the rent question

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began to assume a critical importance, this spirit of independence
contributed much to strengthen the peasants’ morale. For, ‘their
natural heads’ had by then started ganging up against the ryots with
their not-too-natural heads, the white planters. A common proprietary
fear cut across ethnic distinctions. A zamindar would often call it a day
after a mere round or two of sharp encounter and hasten to settle with
a hostile concern for a small consideration, such as an ijara or a job for
a kinsman. The ryots, left in the lurch by such a sordid compromise,
would at this point need all the initiative they could summon in order
to continue independently their struggle against the planters. Blair
Kling has put together detailed first-hand evidence about one such
ongoing struggle [14: 91-3 ] in a manner that proves how beyond a
certain point the indigo rebellion became the peasants’ own show.

1 n this case again the insurrection broke out when in February J 860
the ryots of the Aurangabad concern in Murshidabad district were
pushed beyond their customary threshold of forbearance by a factory
gomastas oppressions. Neither the manager nor his assistant, both
Europeans, did anything to stop this wicked man from screwing out
of the ryots large cash payments as the price of their freedom from
sowing and weeding indigo. His retainers bound up some of the head-
men for refusing to oblige him with more than half the sum he de-
manded on one occasion. This was a signal for the villagers to rebel.
They rescued the captives, and chased, seized, and beat up the gomasta
himself. As tempers rose, 3000 peasants gathered and marched on the
factory. All this provided the big local zamindar with a handle to
advance a cause he had long cherished: he wanted the gomastas job for
his brother. He now set to exploit the situation by using some of the
lesser landlords to work on the peasants’ wrath for his own benefit.
These leaders put up a spurious fight ‘by calling out the ryots for fur-
ther attacks and lathiyal battles and then dismissing them before the
battles materialized’, until the planter, scared out of his wits, decided
to buy his peace by dismissing the unpopular gomasta and appointing
the zamindar s brother in his place.

That was the end of round one. The zamindar, pleased with his bar-
gain, withdrew from the conflict. But the peasants were no longer in
a mood to give up resistance. Having got rid of an oppressive employee
of the factory, they now demanded a reduction of the amount of indigo

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Neel Darpan: The Image of a Peasant Revolt

to be sown. And as the struggle developed, they raised their sights still
higher and resolved to do away with the cultivation of indigo once and
for all. This radical enhancement of the aims of the insurrection cor-
responded to an increase in its thrust as it spread across the borders
of Murshidabad into Malda district. The spontaneity of the initial
jacqueries, too, matured into a conscious drive for unity and organiza-
tion. Hindus and Muslims swore together never again to sow indigo.
Villagers subscribed to common funds to finance the struggle.
Drumbeats and other agreed signals were used by them to warn each
other of an imminent raid by the planters’ men and to mobilize large
numbers of armed villagers in defence of their homes. ‘In fact, they had
it all their own way’, observed an official investigator and added
ruefully: ‘The Police were afraid.’

The lesser landlords who, earlier, had acted as the zamindars’ instru-
ments of incitement, wanted nothing better than to draw in their
horns at this point and opt out of the struggle. But the peasants would
not let them. ‘At this stage’, says Kling, ‘the ring-leaders found them-
selves borne along by the torrent which they had set loose; they were
no longer in control of the ryots, but prisoners of a movement which
they still appeared to direct.’ Failing to stop it, they tried to use it for
their own ends. Morad Biswas, the leader of this group, instigated the
ryots to concentrate their attack on another factory in the neigh-
bourhood in order to force its manager to employ him as its gomasta.
As he was about to clinch his deal with the planter, the peasants,
betrayed by the zamindar not so long ago in precisely the same way,
refused to let Morad withdraw from the campaign and forced him to
commit his son to join in an assault on the factory scheduled for the
following morning. The assault failed and Morad, a reluctant rebel,
was taken prisoner.

The history of the struggle against the Aurangabad concern illustrates
much of what was typical of the landlords’ involvement in the rebellion
of 1860. It shows that they did participate in it and even led it
sometimes, but that this participation was inspired by opportunistic
and limited aims which took it no further than the point beyond which
their interests were antagonistic in absolute terms to those of the
peasant masses. Hence, the emergence of rents as a central issue in the
struggle against the planters constitutes a historic turning point.

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The Small Voice of History

Landlord leadersh ip weakens considerably thereafter and is increasingly
characterized by vacillation, compromise, and betrayal. Not to acknow-
ledge the fact of the landlords participation in the rebellion amounts,
therefore, to exonerating them for all their capitulation and treachery
during the subsequent phase of the rebellion, and correspondingly, to
taking the edge off the sharp contest between them and the poorer
sections of the village for the initiative of the struggle.12

If the landed magnates proved to be opportunist in their support for
the rebellion, the rural middle classes proved to be defeatist. Their
opposition to the planters was inspired by a relatively greater degree of
self-interest. More often than not they had to oppose in order to
survive. Forced into a conflict they were almost exclusively dependent
on the ryots for combat power, if only because they had no private
armies of their own to match those of the cutcherries or the kuthis. Yet
with all the backing they received from the poorer sections of the
village, they were tempted to throw up their arms far too soon in any
encounter that promised no easy victory.

It is this inclination to run away from a fight that made such middle-
class leadership particularly short-lived. This is indicated in astatement
made by a contemporary observer who was second to none in his

12 The betrayal of the upper classes bec ame even more frequent and blatant
as rhe rent struggle intensified after October 1860. As Kling points out, the
planters began to play with remarkable success, on the native landlords’ pro-
prietary fears and enlist their support as allies [ 14: 173 f\ . But they were not the
only class to feel threatened by the increasing militancy of the ryots. A section
of the rich peasants, too, appears to have gone over to the planters in some areas,
generating, wherever this happened, jacqueries followed by the mass exodus of
the ryots. A report from Pabna published by the Somprakash in 1864 said:
‘Some planters . . . have appeased the principal and wealthier projas of the vil-
lages by offering them employment at the factories, and consequently, the latter
are now gathering up the helpless mass of the projas as fuel for the flames of
indigo. Wherever the mandals are yielding to such temptation, affrays and
associated acts of violence are invariably breaking out there. It is precisely
because of this that many projas have deserted Khadampur and other villages’
[11. IV: 79

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Neel Darpan: The Image of a Peasant Revolt

knowledge of the indigo districts. Asked by the Indigo Commission
if he knew of any head ryots who have sufficient resolution and
knowledge to stir up their own ryots and also to communicate with
other ryots in other parts of the district and thus create a combination
among themselves', W.J. Herschel of Nadia said: ‘1 could point out
hundreds such. But the village leaders in this case , with few exceptions ,
had a strong interest in the question themselves . Leaders have sprung up
in one village, who have, in an incredibly short space of time, gained
an enormous influence in numbers of adjacent villages, and have lost
it almost as quickly [RIC 2832 e] . Suprakash Ray quotes this statement
[19:388] minus the twenty-five words we have italicized above. Shorn
thus of much significant information about the rich peasants' motivation
and the limited character of their influence, the statement serves for
Ray as evidence of a collective leadership of the rebel community of
peasants’ [ 19: 387] . Read in full, however, Herschel’s testimony can
mean only one thing; that is, the class interests of the rich peasants
acted as a brake on their participation, and consequently the leadership
of the village headmen proved to be far too transient for the poorer
ryots to develop any abiding trust in it. The fragility of rich peasant
leadership is well illustrated by Lai Behari Day in his account of the
taming of a loud-mouthed modol who had, earlier, incited the ryots
to a fight against the local factory, but agreed, after a little third-degree
treatment, to accept advance for indigo and lie to the police in order
to shield the planter from criminal charges [10: 252-9], No wonder
that the influence gained by some rich peasants ‘in an incredibly
short space of time’ was lost ‘almost as quickly’ for want of a sustained
combativity.

This feebleness was characteristic of the other groups of middle-
class leaders, too — the talukdars and the lesser landlords above the rich
peasant level. Neel Darpan is the story of such a minor landowning
family, the Basus of Swarapur. It has as its hero the elder son of the
family, Navinmadhab. Before the planters clouded his horizon, his
annual income amounted to Rs 700 in rents alone and his other assets
to 1 5 warehouses for grain, 16 bighas of garden land, 20 ploughs, and
50 day-labourers. He could afford to celebrate the Pujas in great style,
throwing large banquets, distributing gifts, entertaining his guests
with music and jatra [Act III, Sc, 2], They grew enough food to feed

1 70 The Small Voice of History

the family for the whole year and still had a good deal left over [Act I,
Sc. 1] . They made a bit of money by selling a part of their own produce
of mustard and tobacco. And all this income from land was supple-
mented by usury [Act III, Sc. 2\. It is an index both of Navinmadhab s
culture and of his resources that he could afford to have a siesta in the
middle of the working day [Act I, Sc. 4].

His affluence impresses by contrast. Sadhucharan, described as a
matabbar , i.e. principal ryot of the village, has only one and a half
ploughs and twenty bighas of land [Act I, Sc. 3], of which about half
has been rendered unproductive by salt water [Act I, Sc. 2\. He cannot
afford to have his house protected by a fence, so that his wife and
daughter are quite defenceless once the men have left for the fields
[Act /, Sc. 4]. Talk of security under the Raj, it does not apply to chasha
families like his own. Old Golok Basu can boast of growing enough
mustard to meet his family’s annual requirement of oil and still have
Rs 60-70 worth of seed to spare [Act /, Sc. 1 ] . The matabbar s wife must
beg lor a little oil from the kolus (oil men) before she can light up for
the evening [ Act I, Sc. 4). And to complete the picture of the relative
prosperity of the Basus, we have in the play an agricultural labourer,
a Tikiri by caste, who, representing as he does the very lowest depth of
village society, comes from a family that never possessed a single
plough and he has no land, no cattle, no cowshed [Act IV, Sc. 1 ] .

Neel Darpan is a play about this Basu family. But it is not a play that
invites us to witness the authentic aspects of the economic and social
operations of these not inconsiderable exploiters in a village of im-
poverished peasantry where even a matabbar ryot is not better off than
a middle peasant of the poorer sort. The author appears to be primarily
concerned to emphasize the paternalistic element in the given agrarian
relationship. Navinmadhab is so utterly dedicated to the welfare of the
ryots that the planter s dewan is tempted to jibe: That bastard talks like
a missionary’ [Act I, Sc. 3} . Even in the midst of his worst trials our hero
sticks to his principle that lto do good unto others is the highest virtue
[Act II, Sc. 3]. And the ryots persecuted by the planters turn to him as
their provider. An innocent peasant dragged away from the fields by
the guardians of the law accompanied by the planters hirelings cries
out to Badobaboo (as Navinmadhab is called by the villagers) to save
his two children from starvation during his involuntary absence from
‘home [Act II, Sc. 3], and sure enough, in the next scene, we have the

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Neel Darpan: The Image of a Peasant Revolt

dewan complaining to the planter how Badobaboo was indeed providing
food for the families of four of the arrested ryots and having their lands
cultivated at his own expense with his own ploughs, cattle, and hired
labour [Act III, Sc . I].

Far from exposing the less benevolent side of the Badobaboo s trans-
actions as a landlord, the play goes so far as to make a virtue of an even
more sinister aspect of his role in the village economy — that of a
moneylender. We gather from Act III, Scene 2, that usury is, for the
Basus, a subsidiary, though not meagre, source of income. We gather,
too, that even the matabbar’s family — not to mention others poorer
still — have to share their hard-earned income with the mahajans every
year [Act I, Sc. 2]. Yet in a play supposed to uphold the cause of the
peasantry, moneylending, that scourge of the rural poor, appears as the
theme for a panegyric [Act V, Sc. 1] . The moneylender is a well-wisher
of his debtors, we are told (Madhusudan Datta misses out on this
key sentence in his translation). Or, again, ‘The mahajans never sue
their debtors.’ The two speeches where these nuggets occur are quite
explicit in their praise of mahajani not merely for its alleged superior-
ity to dadni favoured by the planters, but in absolute terms for the
advantages it is supposed to have for the peasants. The speaker, in both
instances, is the dewan who with all his wickedness is still endowed by
the author with enough sympathy for the ryots to make him suspect
in the planters’ eyes. In choosing such a relatively positive character to
plead in favour of mahajani, Dinabandhu Mitra set himself up as a
defender of the contemporary landlord-moneylender as typified by
Navinmadhab, his hero. And he was by no means the only liberal of
his age to hold this particular brief. Lai Behari Day does precisely the
same thing in his Bengal Peasant Life [10: 21 9-23] . Here we find the
village mahajan insisting on ‘interest at the rate of two payasa per taka
a month’ that is, 37.5 per cent per annum, from a heavily indebted
peasant whose house has been burnt down by the landlord’s men. Yet
the author describes Golaka Poddar, the moneylender, as ‘a most res-
pectable man’ who ‘never cheated anyone and was honest and upright
in his dealings.’ Should the reader be tempted to credit men of Golaka
Poddar s class with anything but the purest of motives. Day warns:
‘The reader must not suppose that all mahajans of Bengal are as hard-
hearted and inhuman as Shakespeare’s model Jew ... we do not be-
lieve that, in Bengal at least, the moneylender is so much detested by

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The Small Voice of History

the peasantry as a portion of the Indian press represents him to be.13
Indeed, but for the good offices of the mahajan, many a Bengal raiyat
would have to cool his heels in the cells of some prison-house.’ In real
life, however, few mahajans would come as clean as that. Take, for
instance, the case of Sri Hari Rai of Chandipur who testified before the
Indigo Commission. It was his custom to charge the ryots interest at
an annual rate of 24 per cent on loans made up of money, 37.5 per cent
on composite loans of money and grain, and anything up to 50 per
cent on loans made up of grain alone [RIC 348 1 e] . Operating on these
lines he got a decree against a ryot called Selim Biswas, attached his
property, and arrested him. But Biswas happened to be a ryot who grew
indigo for the Khalbolia factory. As the peasant was thus sent ‘to cool
his heels in the cells of the moneylender’s cutcherry, the planter
retaliated by seizing Sri Hari Rais gomasta and imprisoning him in
a godown [RIC 3477 e\.

This story contradicts not merely the liberal missionary Lai Behari
Day, but the arch-liberal Rabindranath Tagore himself. For Sri Hari
Rai, the mahajan of Chandipur, was also a zemindar of moderate
substance’ who owned seven villages \RIC 3473 e\. And his record is
a part of the massive evidence which shows that, contrary to Tagores
claim about the zamindars saving the peasantry from the planters’
usurious noose’, the landlord-usurers often acted as the hangmen
themselves. Moneylending was a common practice with landowners
of all kinds — large, medium, and small. It was so with magnates like
JaykrishnaMukherjee of Urtarpara (to whom Lai Behari Day dedicat-
ed his famous work as to one of the most enlightened zamindars in
Bengal’) who had vast estates in Hugli and the Twenty-four Parganas,
paid an annual sadar jama of Rs 90,000 and had, on his own admis-
sion, nearly Rs 100,000 ‘floating as money lent on ‘interest from
twelve to twenty- four per cent’. No wonder that half of his ryots were
in debt [RIC 3807 e, 3821 e, 3825 e\. There were others like Pran-
krishna Pal of Latoodaha and Sri Hari Rai of Chandipur who, though
not of the magnate class, still combined their extremely large zamindari
incomes with mahajani [RIC 29 1 8 e, 3473 e, 3562 e] . And there were,

13 For a specimen of the hostile press the moneylenders got, see an editorial
published in the Sambad Prabhakar on 23 November 1863 [11, 1: 113-1 5].

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Neel Darpan: The Image of a Peasant Revolt

of course, those numberless small talukdars’ mentioned by James
Forlong in his evidence before the Indigo Commission, who — like the
Basus of Swarapur — had ‘very strong mahajani interest to promote’
[RIC 2910 e]. It is these large usurious interests of the rural gentry
which were directly threatened by the planters. An exchange between
the President of the Indigo Commission and Prankrishna Pal put the
nub of the matter thus:

President : You are a mahajan as well as a zamindar, does Indigo culti-
vation interfere with your lending money?

Pfankrishna Pal\ It does interfere, because the ryots are not allowed to
sow rice until the Indigo is sown and afterwards weeded, and it be-
comes too late to do anything for the crop, and consequently poor
ryots are not able to pay off their rice as well as cash debts to me [ RIC
3562 e\.

The mahajan s sense of loss was particularly heightened by the fact that
‘rice debts’ made up of grain for the ryots’ use as food as well as seed,
which normally fetched a rate of interest ranging from twenty-five to
fifty per cent [RIC 3481 e, 3482 e]t tended to be more lucrative than
ever before precisely at this time when the price of rice was rising
steeply [5: 197; RIC 3824 e) . It was inevitable, therefore, that in 1 860
leading planters like Larmour and Forlong should speak about the
mahajans trying ‘to induce the ryots not to fulfil their indigo en-
gagements* and doing ‘all in their power to induce the ryots not to sow
Indigo and to sow a large breadth of rice cultivation’ [RIC2024 e,29\0
e]. Thus, in spite of Jaykrishna Mukherjee’s hypocritical plea for a
peaceful coexistence of planters and landlord-usurers [RIC 3822 e,
3823 e], a direct clash between them could hardly be avoided under
these circumstances. For what was at issue here was neither the zamin-
dar s urge to protect the ryot from the moneylender, as Tagore wanted
us to believe, nor, as Maurice Tweedie of Loknathpur Factory righteously
claimed [RIC 3407 e], ‘the opposition shown to him [i.c. the mahajan]
by the planter when he endeavours to screw too high a rate of interest
out of the ryot.’ The truth simply was that the poor iyot was caught
in a crossfire between dadni and mahajani, two contending systems of
usury patronized respectively by the planter and the landlord, both of

1 74 The Small Voice of History

whom were equally interested in appropriating the peasants’ surplus
[7: 229 & n\. The two systems, as the Somprakash perceptively ob-
served, bore a close family resemblance [ 1 1 , IV: 89] . In upholding the
landlord-usurer against the planter-usurer, Dinabandhu Mitra was, as
the Bengali proverb would put it, siding with the crocodile in the water
against the tiger on the bank. In doing so he, a progressive’ writer,
was at the same time striking a blow, however unconsciously, for an
emergent class who, as Kling points out, benefited most from the
indigo rebellion: ‘Ultimately they snatched the fruits of victory from
the peasants, and the indigo disturbances mark the transfer of power
from planter to moneylender in Lower Bengal’ \14: 75]. In this, too,
he anticipated by many decades an element of liberal-nationalism
which insisted on the unity between the rural poor and their feudal and
semi-feudal exploiters as a condition of success in the struggle against
the Raj. Represented in all its maturity in the political philosophy of
Gandhism, it is expressed with characteristic vigour by Vallabhbhai
Patel during the Bardoli satyagraha. ‘The Government wants to divide
you and the shahukar [moneylender]’, he said in an address to Hari-
jans, Dublas, and artisans in the spring of 1928, ‘but for you your
shahukar is everything. You should laugh at and consider him to be a
fool if somebody says that you should change your shahukar. It is just
like saying to a pativrata [a chaste and dutiful wife] that she should
change her husband. How can you leave the shahukar who has helped
you in your difficulties?’14

We have already noticed how so many of the political beliefs and social
attitudes of the Basu family were almost identical with those cherished
by Dinabandhu Mitra himself. This is of course quite appropriate in
view of the authors affinity to his protagonists in class terms. It adds
greatly to the authenticity of the Basu family’s ideological portrait
as presented in the play. What, however, comes through as less than

14 1 am grateful to D.N. Dhanagare for drawing my attention to this extract
from Satyagraha Patrika q uo ted in his DPhil (University of Sussex) dissertation,
'Peasant Movements in India, 1920-50’.

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Neel Darpan: The Image of a Peasant Revolt

authentic is the ideological portraiture of the peasantry. A close look
at Dinabandhus characterization of Torap should make this clear.

Torap is largely responsible for Dinabandhus fame as a progressive’
writer. For each successive generation of middle-class Bengali radicals
throughout the twentieth century — and this includes even such a
perceptive historian as Suprakash Ray [19: 500] — Torap has been the
symbol of peasant insurgency. That this has been so reveals much
about the baboo’s mental image of peasants and rebels. For, the author
of Neel Darpan has endowed this agricultural labourer with so much
of his own virtues of liberalism and loyal ism that he has, in fact, turned
him into a perfect petty-bourgeois. One is, therefore, not surprised to
learn from Sivnath Shastri how, on the publication of the play, Torap
immediately endeared himself to the readers. What could, indeed, be
more endearing to the Calcutta intelligentsia of 1860 than to read
about someone who thought like themselves and was helped by his
Active existence to perform such brave and noble deeds as beating
up a wicked white planter and saving a pregnant peasant woman
from his lust?

The opening scene of Act II provides us with some details ofTorap s
ideology. He is seen as a prisoner here in the warehouse of the Begun-
berey indigo factory. Four other ryots are his fellow captives. Of these
at least one is an agricultural laboi irer, theTikiri whom we have already
met. The rest, too, are either labourers or poor peasants. Torap domi-
nates the conversation as one who obviously is a leader of the village
poor and deals with the doubts and questions of the others with a
certain amount of knowledge, ability, and authority. One of the ryots
seems to have little faith in the sahebs. He has been the victim of
false criminal charges twice. The second time his accuser was the white
planter of the Bhabnapur factory whom some people regard as such a
nice fellow. Torap, however, jumps to the sahebs defence. The ryot
must have done something wrong to merit his punishment, he says, for
'the saheb of Bhabnapore wouldn’t cause trouble unless there was good
reason for it . . . Had they all been like him, none would have spoken
ill of them.’ The ryot retorts by pointing out that this nice saheb has
in fact been found to have illegally detained seven persons including
a small child and that he still continues to rob the peasants of their
catde. Torap changes the subject, but not the theme. ‘As soon as they

176

The Small Voice of History

come across a saheb who is really a good chap*, he says, they want to
destroy him/ Which then raises the interesting question of the dis-
tinction between good and bad sahebs — a distinction the other ryot is
unable to grasp. Torap explains this in terms similar to those used by
the matron of the Basu family: the magistrates are scions of respectable
families ( badonoker chhawat) while the planters are the low-caste
people of England ( belater chhotonok). ‘Then, quips another captive
peasant, ‘how come that our former Governor went around the fact-
ories being feasted like a bridegroom just before the wedding?’ The
much-harassed ryot appears to have shared the view Sisir Ghose found
common among the villagers in the indigo districts that the British
officials lived off (patramara) the planters’ bounty [2: 35 f]. Unable to
shake off his suspicion about the mutuality of interest between the
Government and the Indigo Establishment, he suggests that the late
Governor Saheb — that is Halliday — judging by his cordiality towards
the kuthis , must have been linked with the planters as a business
partner. Torap dismisses this as absurd, but not being in a position to
say much in favour of Halliday, passes quickly on to the latters
successor who provides him with another toehold for his undaunted
loyalty to the Raj: ‘If by the grace of God our present Governor lives
long enough, we shall have all we need for two square meals and the
spectre of indigo will no longer press on our shoulders.’

This Torap has nothing in common with a peasant up in arms
against his oppressor. He, like the baboo who created him, is full of
a sweet reasonableness which is ready to exonerate the colonial re-
gime for all its crimes against the peasantry. For every bad planter, bad
magistrate, bad Governor named by the harassed and embittered
ryots, our so-called rebel has a good planter, a good magistrate, and a
good Governor to name. This tendency to lean backwards in order to
accommodate a ‘moderate’ point of view essentially hostile to that of
the insurgents is clearly illustrated by Torap’s attitude to the crucial
question about the future of indigo cultivation in Bengal. A decisive
swing away from indigo appears to have begun already in the summer
of 1860 in parts of Jessore, where, according to one of Sisirkumar
Ghose s reports sent in as early as May, the peasants with one voice . . .
said that they would no longer cultivate indigo.’ Pressed by the Joint
Magistrate, Mr Skinner, to carry on with indigo, they firmly declared,

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Neel Darpan: The Image of a Peasant Revolt

‘We won’t sow indigo any longer’ [2: 10]. Later on, in August, in an-
other part of the district they defied still another official plea for indigo
by saying, ‘No, Saheb, if you cut our throats, even then we wont, if we
die for this Indigo, the majority of our countrymen will in future live
happily [2: 27\. Mahesh Chatter jee told the Indigo Commission on
18 July 1860 that ‘according to their present temper and feeling’ the
ryots were unlikely to sow any indigo again [RIC 3529 e). And here is
a selection of answers from the peasants themselves to the Commissions
question whether they would want to cultivate indigo in future:

‘No, not at a rupee for two bundles, nor at a bundle the rupee.’

‘Not for two bundles a rupee, not for a bundle a rupee nor for 100
rupees a beegah.’

‘I would rather go to a country where the indigo plant is never seen or
named.’

‘Rather than sow indigo I will go to another country; 1 would rather
beg than sow indigo.’ [RIC 1 132 e, 1 163 e, 1 180 e, 1216 e]

The authorities appear to have taken this defiance seriously enough.
‘Reports that the ryots would oppose the October sowings’, wrote
O’Malley, ‘led Government to strengthen the military police in the
indigo districts and to send two gunboats to the rivers of Nadia and
Jessore, and Native Infantry to the headquarters stations of these two
districts’ [/#: J06\ . It is clear thus that by the summer of 1 860 masses
of armed, angry peasants were fighting to end the cultivation of indigo
once and for all, and the struggle had by then nearly gone beyond the
bounds of the immediate economic issues involved. Yet it is precisely
at this hour that the rebel peasant, thought up by a luminary of the
Bengal Renaissance, is busy trying to reform the planters. He still
seems to be hoping that they would give up their predatory ways and
take up indigo cultivation as a regular agricultural pursuit in which,
Torap assures them, they can depend on the co-operation of the
peasantry [Act II, Sc. /]! And he continues in this vein — backed by a
nodding assent from Podi Moirani, the white mans procuress [Act II,
Sc. 3] — right up to the rescue scene when, after he has beaten up
Mr Rogue, he still finds it useful to try and persuade him to ‘carry on
your business by mutual consent’ [Act III, Sc. 3]. This is not an angry,
insurgent peasant’s voice addressing an enemy; it is a baboo’s voice

1 78 The Small Voice of History

begging the saheb to come to terms with the turbulent chashas before
they get out of hand.

Which brings up the question of violence. The widespread use of
violence by the ryots against the combined forces of planters, police,
and troops is a fact about the indigo rebellion recorded in all
contemporary evidence. A few words from a local observer, such as
those of Sisirkumar Ghose from Jessore in August 1860, can even at
this distance in time sum up for us a quickening situation: ‘The plant-
ers are collecting revolvers, ammunition and lathials . . . while the
villagers are gathering clubs and spears . . / [2: 26]. Neel Darpan ,
published within weeks of this despatch, has nothing in it even
remotely approaching the coiled tension of these lines. This is so be-
cause the author is simply not responsive to the music of a clash of arms
between the peasant and his oppressors.

It is not that there is no violence in the play. There is indeed a lot
of it, in the form of the planters terror backed by the official engines
of repression. But the theme of a retaliatory violence on the victims’
part is kept firmly under control throughout the text. The author does
not allow his realism (for which he is so highly rated by the literary
pundits) to get the better of his philosophy. He is ready to douse with
moderation every surge of peoples anger. When 200 ryots, armed with
lathis, are poised for an attack on the factory, Sadhucharan is made
to pacify them [Act V Sc. 2]. When Torap succeeds at last in laying his
hands on the wicked junior planter, Navinmadhab, our hero, tries to
reason with him: ‘Why beat him, Torap? We don’t have to be cruel to
them even if they are so themselves’ [Act HI, Sc. 3] . And it is a measure
of Navinmadhab’s sense of values that he allows himself to get into a
fight with one of the planters who insults his dead father s memory but
not with the other planter who tries to rape a pregnant peasant woman.
In any case, his advice is not lost on Torap who, after he has bitten off
Mr Wood s nose in the affray involving Badobaboo, says that he would
have inflicted further physical punishment on the planter if he had a
chance, ‘but I would not have killed him, as he is a creature of God’
[Act K Sc. 2].

This highly sanctimonious tone, this neatly drawn distinction
between chastisement and annihilation, can come only from one who
can afford not to have his hatred boiling over, not to indulge in

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Neel Darpan: The Image of a Peasant Revolt

‘excesses’ when the planters are looting, burning, raping all around.
This cannot be the attitude of an indigo peasant of 1860 involved, by
all accounts, in a most sanguinary battle for survival. Torap is a pseudo-
peasant and a pseudo-rebel.

Note how, in the first place, he displays none of the initiative with
which all contemporary observers credit the peasant rebels. In fact,
he hardly ever confronts the planters on his own . On each of the two
occasions when he actually puts up a fight, he does so as the Badobaboo s
strong-arm man. The author endows him with only as much militancy
as would be needed to highlight the overriding quality of all — that is,
his loyalty to Navinmadhab. And it is precisely because of this — and
here is a second important thing to note about him — that his militancy
has little in common with that of the rebels of 1 860. All contemporary
accounts agree on the highly organized and steady combativeness of
the insurgent peasantry, such as was exhibited in that minor epic of a
peasant war brought against the Aurangabad Concern. By contrast,
Toraps combativeness appears to be spasmodic. It is not disciplined
because it is not informed by the consciousness of the rural proletariat.
Gifted by his liberal maker with a petty-bourgeois consciousness his
militancy explodes in brief, intermittent bursts. What goes well with
this is the politics of the bomb and of middle-class terrorism, not the
politics of a revolutionary peasant war. Finally, it should be noted that
he is not even all that brave: he confesses to being mightily scared at
the sight of Navinmadhab being hit on his head by the planter, and in
his very last speech he says: ‘Let me now hide myself inside the barn.
I shall give them the slip after dark. The scoundrel will let hell loose on
the village to make up for his lost nose’ [Act V, Sc. 2\. This does not
strike one as exactly the sentiments of a peasant hero, a fish in water
at the height of a popular rebellion sweeping the countryside.

The defeatism of Toraps parting words represents the spirit of the
play as a whole. Forced into a confrontation with the power of the
planters, he wants to run away as soon as possible. He is not the only
one to do so. At one point Sadhucharan, too, thought of leaving the
village with his entire family in order to take refuge in a neighbouring
zamindars estate [Act /, Sc. 2], And although in the opening scene
Golok Basu rejects all advice in favour of desertion, the idea occurs to
his son soon afterwards when he finds the old man threatened with

1 80 The Small Voice of History

imprisonment under the new law [Act II, Sc. 3] . This temptation to run
away is only equalled by all the principal protagonists’ efforts to placate
the planters, reason with them, and arrive at a compromise — and fail-
ing all this, to try and defend themselves by litigation. The only
character to take a stand of total defiance is a poor ryot who, even as
he is forcibly led away from the fields, asserts that he would rather rot
in jail than grow indigo for that skunk of a planter’ [Act II, Sc. 3 ]. But
this one firm voice of a genuinely rebellious peasant is drowned in
the chorus of petty-bourgeois wailing of the rest of the cast. In the
end there is nothing in all their faith in the law, the civil service, the
Lieutenant-Governor, and the Queen that can save the Basus of
Swarapur from being utterly ruined. Neel Darpan, written by a liberal
in the midst of a peasant revolt, shows where the liberal stands at the
time of a peasant revolt: he stands close to the power of the state seeking
cover behind the law and the bureaucracy. It also shows what happens
to him if he does so: he is destroyed.

References

Anon., The Life of Grish Chunder Ghose ... by One Who Knew Him (Calcutta:
1911).

Bagal, Jogesh Chandra (ed.), Peasant Revolution in Bengal (Calcutta: 1953).
Buckland,C.E., Bengalunder the Lieutenant-Governors, \o\. 1 (Calcutta: 1901).
Chattopadhyay, Bankimchandra, Bankim Rachanavali, vol. 2 (Sahitya Samsad
Edition, 3rd impression, Calcutta: 1964).

Chowdhury, Benoy K., Growth of Commercial Agr iculture in Bengal (1757—
1900), vol. 1 (Calcutta: 1964).

, ‘Agrarian Relations in Bengal, 1859-1885’, in N.K. Sinha (ed.), The

History of Bengal, 1757-1905 (Calcutta: 1967).

— , ‘Growth of Commercial Agriculture and its Impact on the Peas-
ant Economy , Indian Economic and Social History Review , vol. 7, no. 2
(June 1970).

Dasi, Binodini, Amur Katha O Anyanya Rachana (Calcutta: 1969).

Datta, Michael Madhusudan, Madhusudan Rachanavali (Sahitya Samsad Edi-
tion, Calcutta: 1965).

Day, Lai Behari, Bengal Peasant Life (reprint of the 1 878 edition incorporating
the two-volume edition of Govinda Samanta published in 1 874, Calcutta:
1 955-6 6).

Ghose, Benoy, SamayikPatre Banglar Samajchitra, 4 vols (Calcutta: 1955-66).

181

Neel Darpan: The Image of a Peasant Revolt

Ghose, Girishchandra, Girish Rachanavali , vol. 2 (Calcutta: 1971).
Indramitra, Karunasagar Vidyasagar (Calcutta: 1969).

Kling, Blair B., The Blue Mutiny. Indigo Disturbances in Bengal 1859-1862
(Philadelphia: 1966).

Mitra, Dinabandhu, Dinabandhu Rachanavali (Sahitya Samsad Edition,
Calcutta: 1967).

Mitra, Peary Chand, Alaler G barer Dulal, in Tekchand Granthavali (Hitavadi
Edition, Calcutta: 1912).

Natarajan, L., Peasant Uprisings in India , 1850-1900 (Bombay: 1953).
O’Malley, L.S.S., Bengal District Gazetteer: Murshidabad (Calcutta: 1914).
Ray, Suprakash, Bharater Krishak Bidroha O Ganatantrik Samgram (Calcutta:
1966).

Reisner, I.M. & N.M. Goldberg (eds), Tilakand the Struggle for Indian Freedom
(Indian Edition, New Delhi: 1966).

Shastri, Sivnath, Ramtanu Lahiri O Tatkalin Bangasamaj (New Age Edition,
Calcutta: 1955).

Sinhd, Pradip, Nineteenth-century Bengal. Aspects of Social History (Calcutta:
1955).

Tagore, Rabindranath, ‘Rava ter Katha, in Rabindra Rachanavali , vol. 1 3 (Cen-
tenary Edition, Calcutta: 1961).

Whitcombe, Elizabeth, Agrarian Conditions in Northern India , vol. 1 (Berkeley,
Los Angeles, London: 1972).

Glossary

Abhadra : not bhadra (see below).

Amin: a native employee on the supervisory staff of an indigo factory.

Banchat bada pandit hoiacbhe. literally, ‘The sister-fucker is showing off his
learning.’

Bhadra : pertaining to the bhadralok; - loh. a general term used to indicate the
elite status shared by the three highest ranking Hindu castes of Bengal;
santan. : scion of a bhadralok family.

Bigha : a land measure which, in Bengal, stands for 1 600 square yards or a little
less than a third of an acre.

Blue Monkey: translated from the Bengali words ‘ neel bandar used in a
contemporary popular verse to describe the white indigo planters.

Chandal: one of the lowest and least pure castes.

Chasha: peasant.

Dadni : a system of cash advances made out to peasant cultivators in order to
induce them to grow indigo and sell it to the factories.

Dawl: faction.

1 82 The Small Voice of History

Dewan: a native employee on the supervisory staff of an indigo factory.
Dharmaghar. strike.

Dudu Miam principal leader of the Farazi peasant insurrections in eastern
Bengal in the nineteenth century.

Gomasta : a native employee on the supervisory staff of an indigo factory.
Ijara: lease.

Jatra: a form of folk theatre.

Jotedar. a class of rich peasant farmers.

Kanu\ one of the two brothers who led the revolt of the Santal peasantry in

1855.

Karmachari : employee, official.

Kayastha : one of the elite castes of Bengal.

Kulin: a term denoting some of the purer’ groups among the elite castes like
Brahmans and Kayasthas.

Kuthi : the headquarters of an indigo planter.

Lathial : a mercenary armed with a heavy bamboo cudgel.

Madhyabitta : those belonging to middle-income groups.

Mahajan : moneylender.

Mufassil : the country, as distinct from Calcutta.

Mukhtar. a legal agent or attorney who in most cases, is not allowed to plead.
Naib: manager of a landlord’s estate.

Nana Sahib: one of the principal leaders of the Great Rebellion of 1 857.
Parwana: an order; a written command.

Pathshala : a primary school of the traditional, as against Western, kind.
Patni/Putni lease of lands with zamindari rights.

Proja: tenant.

Pucca : brick-built.

Puja: ritual worship often accompanied by festivities.

Sadar. a principal seat of government in a province or district, as distinct from
subdivisional or other secondary administrative centres.

Sadhubhasha: elegan t, somewhat Sanskri tized vocabulary associated with elite
status in Bengali society.

Sala: wife’s brother; here used as a term of abuse.

Samaj: an association usually (though nor always) based on the identity of its
members’ social status.

Samiti: an association usually (though not always) based on the identity of its
members’ professional or occupational interests.

Sammelam conference, meeting, gathering, etc.

Sarkar. government, regime.

Selami : a gratuity or offering on receiving a lease.

Shyamchand \ an instrument of torture used by landlords against their tenants
and by the planters against the indigo peasants.

Neel Darpan: The Image of a Peasant Revolt 183

Sidhu: one of the two brothers who led the revolt of the Santal peasantry in

1855.

Sudarsan : a mythical instrument of war, shaped as a circular blade, used by the
god Vishnu to cut down his enemies.

Swadeshi', the national protest movement (1005-8) against the partition of
Bengal.

Talukdar. a hereditary landlord whose rank, in Bengal* is usually inferior only
to that of the zamindar.

Tantia Topi : one of the principal leaders of the Great Rebellion of 1857.

Titu Mir. leader of the famous peasant revolt of 1 83 1 in Barasat near Calcutta.
Vakil: a lawyer who is allowed to plead in a lower court.

Zamindar. a Bengali landlord of the highest denomination whose hereditary
title to property was confirmed by the Permanent Settlement of 1 793;
zamindari : (n.) a zamindars estate; (adj.) pertaining to a zamindar.

Five Villages

The appearance of an English version of Tarasankar Banerjees
Panchagram will inevitably call for a comparison between it
and two other important novels which have recently been
translated from Bengali into English — namely. The Puppet's Tale
by Manik Bandyopadhyay, and Pather Panchali by Bibhudbhushan
Banerjee. The parallelisms are obvious. The Puppet's Tale and Pancha-
gram are both about the dilemma of their respective heroes caught
between change and stagnation. Yet how flat and schematic the latter
is compared to the other novel if only because Tarasankar Banerjee,
unlike Manik Bandyopadhyay, fails to interiorize the conflict in terms
of the development of his characters. A reader of Pather Panchali
too must be impressed by the difference between its author s treatment
of rural decay as the setting for a tragedy and the uses made of the same
theme in Panchagram to express programmatic worries.

It is indeed significant that all three of these novels arc about the
disintegration of traditional village society in Bengal and were published
between 1 929 and 1 943, that is, between the Great Depression and the
Great Famine. They mirror a common crisis. But Tarasankar Baner-
jee reacts to it rather differently from Bibhudbhushan Banerjee and
Manik Bandyopadhyay. Hariharof Pather Panchali deserts his village.
Sashi of The Puppet's Tale feels irretrievably trapped in it. Debu, the
hero of Panchagram , responds, by contrast, with a phoney optimism
about the prospect of a satyayug round the corner. ‘Each and every
family in Panchagram’, he says.

185

Five Villages

will be a family of righteousness. There will come a day when there
is no scarcity in these villages, when people will not have to commit
great wrongs. There will be a surplus of food and clothing and medi-
cine. People will be healthy, strong, courageous and fearless. The vil-
lage will be full of joy, and peace will reign. No one in the country
will remain without food, and with the strength gained from proper
nourishment people will be able to resist disease. There will be medi-
cines and qualified doctors to administer them. Our children will
grow to be taller in stature than ourselves. Their chests will be broad
and their bodies will be fleshy and muscular. We will build new houses
and new roads . . .

This is one of several declamatory statements in which Debu ex-
presses his hope for a new life, not, as one might suspect, to a gather-
ing of local patriots, but to the young lady whom he wants to marry.
It is indeed such confounding of private feelings and public enthusiasm,
the love for ones girl and the love for ones country, that fills this novel
with a tedious didacticism.

The author himself was to emphasize his didactic intentions when,
years later, in his autobiographical Amar Sahitya-Jeevan, he was to re-
fer to Panchagram as ‘the clearest expression of my dream-image’ of
India and illustrate this by the words quoted above. But he was no
Balzac who, as Lukics so perceptively noticed, never completely cut
himself oft from realism even in the most utopian of his novels, such
as Le Midecin de Campagne and Le Curd de Village. In Panchagram ,
however, the utopian syndrome finds its expression in a wide range
of non-r/picalities. The principal characters appear to inhabit an
uncomplicated moral universe painted in black and white. They act
out their symbolic parts, in the convention of the Bengali jatray to
represent Virtue or Vice — Srihari as Corruption, Nyayratna as Righte-
ousness, Debu as Altruism, Swarna as Innocence, and so on. Even
Durga, who could have developed into something like a real character,
is made to fit the image of the tart-wi th- the-golden -heart and eventually
dissolves in piety. And the manner in which the author allows the
potential of Padmas unrequited love for Debu to crumble into senti-
mentality shows, by contrast, what an immensely superior novelist
Manik Bandyopadhyay was to invest an identical relationship, between

1 86 The Small Voice of History

Kusum and Sashi in The Puppet's Tale , with a profound and many-
sided contradiction.

Panchagram could hardly be expected, therefore, to offer the foreign
reader any great insight into the Bengali soul. But it has much valuable
information to offer him about rural life in western Bengal, parti-
cularly in and around Birbhum district, during the years between the
two world wars. For this novel, like many of his other works, displays
the authors considerable understanding of the villagers way of life —
of agricultural practices, farm calendars, peasant customs, agrarian
relationships, caste rules, festivals, rituals, and many other aspects of
his material and spiritual culture. He may thus be said to have brought
up to date Lai Behari Days famous nineteenth-century documentary
about approximately the same region. The authors are both knowledge-
able. Both sympathize with the village poor. Fiction, in both cases, is
made to serve as the purveyor of facts. Only, the absence of literary pre-
tension makes Govinda Samanta more attractive to read than Pancha -
gram .

Tarasankar Banerjee was no great master of prose and the drabness
of the original has been faithfully rendered into English here. And the
readers progress through this dull literary landscape is helped neither
by the want of uniformity in the transcription of Bengali names nor
by the misprints in which this book abounds.

On Some Aspects of the
Historiography of Colonial India

IThe historiography of Indian nationalism has for a long time
been dominated by elitism — colonialist elitism and bourgeois-
• nationalist elitism. Both originated as the ideological product
of British rule in India, but have survived the transfer of power and
been assimilated to neo-colonialist and neo-nationalist forms of
discourse in Britain and India respectively. Elitist historiography of the
colonialist or neo-colonialist type counts British writers and institutions
among its principal protagonists, but has its imitators in India and
other countries too. Elitist historiography of the nationalist or neo-
nationalist type is primarily an Indian practice but not without imi-
tators in the ranks of liberal historians in Britain and elsewhere.

2. Both these varieties of elitism share the prejudice that the mak-
ing of the Indian nation and the development of the conscious-
ness— nationalism — which informed this process, were exclusively or
predominantly elite achievements. In the colonialist and neo-colonialist
historiographies these achievements are credited to British colonial
rulers, administrators, policies, institutions, and culture; in the nation-
alist and neo-nationalist writings — to Indian elite personalities, insti-
tutions, activities, and ideas.

3. The first of these two historiographies defines Indian nationalism
primarily as a function of stimulus and response. Based on a narrowly
behaviouristic approach, this represents nationalism as the sum of

Copyright © 1982 Ranajit Guha. First published in Ranajit Guha, ed..
Subaltern Studies I (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1 982), pp. 1-7.

188

The Small Voice of History

the activities and ideas by which the Indian elite responded to the
institutions, opportunities, resources, etc. generated by colonialism.
There are several versions of this historiography, but the central
modality common to them is to describe Indian nationalism as a sort
of ‘learning process’ through which the native elite became involved in
politics by trying to negotiate the maze of institutions and the
corresponding cultural complex introduced by the colonial authorities
in order to govern the country. What made the elite go through this
process was, according to this historiography, no lofty idealism
addressed to the general good of the nation but simply the expectation
of rewards in the form of a share in the wealth, power, and prestige
created by and associated with colonial rule; and it was the drive for
such rewards with all its concomitant play of collaboration and com-
petition between the ruling power and the native elite as well as be-
tween various elements among the latter themselves, which, we are
told, was what constituted Indian nationalism.

4. The general orientation of the other kind of elitist historiography
is to represent Indian nationalism as primarily an idealist venture in
which the indigenous elite led the people from subjugation to freedom.
There are several versions of this historiography which differ from each
other in the degree of their emphasis on the role of individual lead-
ers or elite organizations and institutions as the main or motivating
force in this venture. However, the modality common to them all is to
uphold Indian nationalism as a phenomenal expression of the goodness
of the native elite with the antagonistic aspect of their relation to the
colonial regime made, against all evidence, to look larger than its colla-
borationist aspect, their role as promoters of the cause of the people
than that as exploiters and oppressors, their altruism and self-abnegation
dian their scramble for the modicum of power and privilege granted
by the rulers in order to make sure of their support for the Raj. The
history of Indian nationalism is thus written up as a sort of spiritual
biography of the Indian elite.

5. Elitist historiography is of course not without its uses. It helps
us to know more about the structure of the colonial state, the operation
of its various organs in certain histoiical circumstances, the nature of
the alignment of classes which sustained it; some aspects of the
ideology of the elite as die dominant ideology of the period; about the

189

On Some Aspects of the Historiography

contradictions between the two elites and the complexities of their
mutual oppositions and coalitions; about the role of some of the more
important British and Indian personalities and elite organizations.
Above all it helps us to understand the ideological character of historio-
graphy itself.

6. What, however, historical writing of this kind cannot do is to
explain Indian nationalism for us. For it fails to acknowledge, far less
interpret, the contribution made by the people on their own , that is,
independently of the elite , to the making and development of this na-
tionalism. In this particular respect the poverty of this historiography
is demonstrated beyond doubt by its failure to understand and assess
the mass articulation of this nationalism except, negatively, as a law
and order problem, and positively, if at all, either as a response to the
charisma of certain elite leaders or in the currently more fashion-
able terms of vertical mobilization by the manipulation of factions.
The involvement of the Indian people in vast numbers, sometimes in
hundreds of thousands or even millions, in nationalist activities and
ideas is thus represented as a diversion from a supposedly ‘real* political
process, that is, the grinding away of the wheels of the state apparatus
and of elite institutions geared to it, or it is simply credited, as an act
of ideological appropriation, to the influence and initiative of the elite
themselves. The bankruptcy of this historiography is clearly exposed
when it is called upon to explain such phenomena as the anti-Rowlatt
upsurge of 1919 and the Quit India movement of 1942 — to name
only two of numerous instances of popular initiative asserting itself in
the course of nationalist campaigns in defiance or absence of elite con-
trol. How can such one-sided and blinkered historiography help us to
understand the profound displacements, well below the surface of elite
policies, which made Chauri-Chaura or the militant demonstrations
of solidarity with the RIN mutineers possible?

7. This inadequacy of elitist historiography follows direedy from
the narrow and partial view of politics to which it is committed by
virtue of its class outlook. In all writings of this kind the parameters
of Indian politics are assumed to be or enunciated as exclusively or
primarily those of the institutions introduced by the British for the
government of the country and the corresponding sets of laws, poli-
cies, attitudes, and other elements of the superstructure. Inevitably,

190

The Small Voice of History

therefore, a historiography hamstrung by such a definition can do no
more than to equate politics with the aggregation ofactivities and ideas
of those who were directly involved in operating these institutions,
that is, the colonial rulers and their efeves — the dominant groups in
native society. To the extent that their mutual transactions were
thought to be all there was to Indian nationalism, the domain of the
latter is regarded as coincident with that of politics.

8. What clearly is left out of this un-historical historiography is
the politics of the people. For parallel to the domain of elite politics there
existed throughout the colonial period another domain of Indian poli-
tics in which the principal actors were not the dominant groups of the
indigenous society or the colonial authorities but the subaltern classes
and groups constituting the mass of the labouring population and the
intermediate strata in town and country — that is, the people. This was
an autonomous domain, for it neither originated from elite politics nor
did its existence depend on the latter. It was traditional only in so far
as its roots could be traced back to pre-colonial times, but it was by
no means archaic in the sense of being outmoded. Far from being
destroyed or rendered virtually ineffective, as was elite politics of the
traditional type by the intrusion of colonialism, it continued to ope-
rate vigorously in spite of the latter, adjusting itself to the conditions
prevailing under the Raj and in many respects developing entirely new
strains in both form and content. As modern as indigenous elite poli-
tics, it was distinguished by its relatively greater depth in time as well
as in structure.

9. One of the more important features of this politics related pre-
cisely to those aspects of mobilization which are so little explained by
elitist historiography. Mobilization in the domain of elite politics
was achieved vertically whereas in that of subaltern politics this was
achieved horizontally. The instrumentation of the former was charac-
terized by a relatively greater reliance on the colonial adaptations of
British parliamentary institutions and the residua of semi-feudal
political institutions of the pre-colonial period; that of the latter relied
rather more on the traditional organization of kinship and territoriality
or on class associations depending on the level of the consciousness of
the people involved. Elite mobilization tended to be relatively more
legalistic and constitutionalist in orientation, subaltern mobilization

On Some Aspects of the Historiography 1 9 1

relatively more violent. The former was, on the whole, more cautious
and controlled, the latter more spontaneous. Popular mobilization in
the colonial period was realized in its most comprehensive form in
peasant uprisings. However, in many historic instances involving large
masses of the working people and petty bourgeoisie in the urban areas
too the figure of mobilization derived directly from the paradigm of
peasant insurgency.

10. The ideology operative in this domain, taken as a whole, re-
flected the diversity of its social composition with the outlook of its
leading elements dominating that of the others at any particular time
and within any particular event. However, in spite of such diversity
one of its invariant features was a notion of resistance to elite domi-
nation. This followed from the subalterniry common to all the social
constituents of this domain and as such distinguished it sharply
from that of elite politics. This ideological element was of course not
uniform in quality or density in all instances. In the best of cases it en-
hanced the concreteness, focus, and tension of subaltern political ac-
tion. However, there were occasions when its emphasis on sectional
interests disequilibrated popular movements in such a way as to create
economistic diversions and sectarian splits, and generally to undermine
horizontal alliances.

1 1 . Yet another set of the distinctive features of this politics derived
from the conditions of exploitation to which the subaltern classes were
subjected in varying degrees as well as from its relation to the pro-
ductive labour of the majority of its protagonists, that is, workers and
peasants, and to the manual and intellectual labour respectively of
the non-industrial urban poor and the lower sections of the petty bour-
geoisie. The experience of exploitation and labour endowed this poli-
tics with many idioms, norms, and values which put it in a category
apart from elite politics.

12. These and other distinctive features (the list is by no means
exhaustive) of the politics of the people did not of course appear always
in the pure state described in the last three paragraphs. The impact of
living contradictions modified them in the course of their actualization
in history. However, with all such modifications they still helped to
demarcate the domain of subaltern politics from that of elite politics.
The coexistence of these two domains or streams, which can be sensed

1 92 The Small Voice of History

by intuition and proved by demonstration as well, was the index of an
important historical truth, that is, the failure of the Indian bourgeoisie
to speak for the nation . There were vast areas in the life and consciousness
of the people which were never integrated into their hegemony. The
structural dichotomy that arose from this is a datum of Indian history
of the colonial period, which no one who sets out to interpret it can
ignore without falling into erroi.

1 3. Such dichotomy did not, however, mean that these two do-
mains were hermetically sealed off from each other and there was no
contact between them. On the contrary, there was a great deal of
overlap arising precisely from the effort made from time to time by the
more advanced elements among the indigenous elite, especially the
bourgeoisie, to integrate them. Such effort when linked to struggles
which had more or less clearly defined anti-imperialist objectives and
were consistently waged, produced some splendid results. Linked, on
other occasions, to movements which either had no firm anti-imperialist
objectives at all or had lost them in the course of their development and
deviated into legalist, constitutionalist, or some other kind of com-
promise with the colonial government, they produced some spectacular
retreats and nasty reversions in the form of sectarian strife. In either
case the braiding together of the two strands of elite and subaltern
politics led invariably to explosive situations indicating that the mas-
ses mobilized by the elite to fight for their own objectives managed to
break away from their control and put the characteristic imprint of
populai politics on campaigns initiated by the upper classes.

14. However, the initiatives which originated from the domain of
subaltern politics were not, on their part, powerful enough to develop
the nationalist movement into a full-fledged struggle for national
liberation. The working class was still not sufficiently mature in the ob-
jective conditions of its social being and in its consciousness as a class-
for-itself, nor was it firmly allied yet with the peasantry. As a result it
could do nothing to take over and complete the mission which the
bourgeoisie had failed to realize. The outcome of it all was that the
numerous peasant uprisings of the period, some of them massive in
scope and rich in anti-colonialist consciousness, waited in vain for
a leadership to raise them above localism and generalize them into a
nationwide anti-imperialist campaign. In the event, much of the sec-
tional struggle of workers, peasants, and the urban petty bourgeoisie

193

On Some Aspects of the Historiography

either got entangled in economism or, wherever politicized, remained,
for want of a revolutionary leadership, far too fragmented to form
effectively into anything like a national liberation movement.

1 5. It is the study of this historic failure of the nation to come to its
own , a failure due to the inadequacy of the bourgeoisie as well as of
the working class to lead it into a decisive victory over colonialism and
a bourgeois-democratic revolution of either the classic nineteenth-
century type under the hegemony of the bourgeoisie or a more mod-
ern type under the hegemony of workers and peasants, that is, a new
democracy* — it is the study of this failure which constitutes the central
problematic of the historiography of colonial India . There is no one given
way of investigating this problematic. Let a hundred flowers blos-
som and we don’t mind even the weeds. Indeed we believe that in the
practice of historiography even the elitists have a part to play if only
by way of teaching by negative examples. But we are also convinced
that elitist historiography should be resolutely fought by developing
an alternative discourse based on the rejection of the spurious and un-
historical monism characteristic of its view of Indian nationalism and
on the recognition of the coexistence and interaction of the elite and
subaltern domains of politics.

16. We are sure that we are not alone in our concern about the
present state of the political historiography of colonial India and in
seeking a way out. The elitism of modern Indian historiography is an
oppressive fact resented by many others, students, teachers, and writ-
ers like ourselves. They may not all subscribe to what has been said
above on this subject in exactly the way in which we have said it.
However, we have no doubt that many other historiographical points
of view and practices are likely to converge close to where we stand.
Our purpose in making our own views known is to promote such a
convergence. We claim no more than to try and indicate an orientation
and hope to demonstrate in practice that this is feasible. In any dis-
cussion which may ensue we expect to learn a great deal not only from
the agreement of those who think like us but also from the criticism
of those who don’t.

The Prose of Counter-Insurgency

When a peasant rose in revolt at any time or place under the
Raj, he did so necessarily and explicitly in violation of a
series of codes which defined his very existence as a member
of that colonial, and still largely semi-feudal, society. 1 For his subalternity
was materialized by the structure of property, institutionalized by law,
sanctified by religion, and made tolerable — and even desirable — by
tradition. To rebel was indeed to destroy many of those familiar signs
which he had learned to read and manipulate in order to extract a
meaning out of the harsh world around him and live with it. The risk
in ‘turning things upside down’ under these conditions was indeed so
great that he could hardly afford to engage in such a project in a state
of absentmindedness.

There is nothing in the primary sources of historical evidence to
suggest anything other than this. These give the lie to the myth, retailed
so often by careless and impressionistic writing on the subject, of
peasant insurrections being purely spontaneous and unpremeditated
affairs. The truth is quite to the contrary. It would be difficult to cite
an uprising on any significant scale that was not in fact preceded either

Copyright ©1983 Ranajit Guha. First published in Ranajit Guha, ed.,
Subaltern Studies II (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 1-42. List of
Abbreviations'. BC — Board s Collections, India Office Records, London; JC —
Fort William judicial Consultations in BC; JP — Judicial Proceedings, West
Bengal State Archives, Calcutta; MDS— Maharaja Deby Sinha (Nashipur Raj
Estate: 1914).

1 I am grateful to my colleagues of the Subaltern Studies editorial team for
their comments on an initial draft of this essay.

195

The Prose of Counter-Insurgency

by less militant types of mobilization when other means had been tried
and found wan ting, or by parley amongst principals seriously to weigh
the pros and cons of any recourse to arms. In events so very different
from each other in context, character, and the composition of parti-
cipants such as the Rangpur dhing against Debi Sinha (1783), the
Barasat bidroha led by Titu Mir (1831), the Santal hool (1855), and
the ‘blue mutiny’ of 1 860 the protagonists in each case had tried out
petitions, deputations, or other forms of supplication before actu-
ally declaring war on their oppressors.2 Again, the revolts of the Kol
(1832), the Santal and the Munda (1899-1900) as well as the Rang-
pur dhing and the jacqueries in Allahabad and Ghazipur districts
during the Sepoy Rebellion of 1 857-8 (to name only two out of many
instances in that remarkable series) had all been inaugurated by
planned and in some cases protracted consultation among the repre-
sentatives of the local peasant masses.3 Indeed there is hardly an
instance of the peasantry, whether the cautious and earthy villagers of
the plains or the supposedly more volatile adi vasis of the upland tracts,
stumbling or drifting into rebellion. They had far too much at stake
and would not launch into it except as a deliberate, even if desperate,
way out of an intolerable condition of existence. Insurgency, in other
words, was a motivated and conscious undertaking on the part of the
rural masses.

Yet this consciousness seems to have received little notice in the
literature on the subject. Historiography has been content to deal with
the peasant rebel merely as an empirical person or member of a class,
but not as an entity whose will and reason constituted the praxis called
rebellion. The omission is indeed dyed into most narratives by meta-
phors assimilating peasant revolts to natural phenomena: they break

2 The instances are far too numerous to cite. For some of these see MDSy
pp. 46-7, 48-9 on the Rangpur dhing; BC 54222: Metcalfe & Blunt to Court
of Directors (10 April 1832), paras 14-15 on the Barasat uprising; W.W.
Hunter, Annals of Rural Bengal (7th edition; London: 1897), pp. 237-8, and
JP, 4 October 1855: ‘The Thacoors Perwannah’ for the Santal hook C.E.
Buddand, Bengal Under the Lieutenant-Governors , vol. I (Calcutta: 1901),
p. 192 for the ‘blue mutiny .

3 See, for instance, MDSy pp. 579-80; Freedom Struggle in Uttar Pradesh ,
vol. IV (Lucknow: 1959), pp. 284-5, 549.

196

The Small Voice of History

out like thunderstorms, heave like earthquakes, spread like wild fires,
infect like epidemics. In other words, when the proverbial clod of earth
turns, this is a matter to be explained in terms of natural history.
Even when this historiography is pushed to the point of producing
an explanation in rather more human terms it will do so by assuming
an identity of nature and culture, a hallmark, presumably, of a very low
state of civilization and exemplified in ‘those periodical outbursts of
crime and lawlessness to which all wild tribes are subject’, as the first
historian of the Chuar rebellion put it.4 Alternatively, an explanation
will be sought in an enumeration of causes — of, say, factors of econo-
mic and political deprivation which do not relate at all to the peasant s
consciousness or do so negatively — triggering off rebellion as a sort of
reflex action, that is, as an instinctive and almost mindless response to
physical suffering of one kind or another (e.g. hunger, torture, forced
labour, etc.) or as a passive reaction to some initiative of his superordinate
enemy. Either way, insurgency is regarded as external to the peasant s
consciousness and Cause is made to stand in as a phantom surrogate
for Reason, the logic of that consciousness.

How did historiography come to acquire this particular blind spot
and never find a cure? For an answer one could start by having a close
look at its constituting elements and examine those cuts, seams, and
stitches — those cobbling marks — which tell us about the material it is
made of and the manner of its absorption into the fabric of writing.

The corpus of historical writings on peasant insurgency in colo-
nial India is made up of three types of discourse. These may be des-
cribed as primary, secondary , and tertiary according to the order of their
appearance in time and their filiation. Each of these is differentiated
from the other two by the degree of its formal and/or acknowledged
(as opposed to real and/or tacit) identification with an official point
of view, by the measure of its distance from the event to which it refers,

4 J.C. Price, The Chuar Rebellion of 1 799 \ p. cl. The edition of the work used
in this essay is the one printed in A. Mitra (ed.), District Handbooks: Midnapur
(Alipore: 1953), appendix IV.

The Prose of Counter- Insurgency 1 97

and by the ratio of the distributive and integrative components in its
narrative.

To begin with primary discourse, it is almost without exception
official in character — official in a broad sense of the term. That is, it
originated not only with bureaucrats, soldiers, sleuths, and others
direcdy employed by the government, but also with those in the non-
official sector who were symbiotically related to the Raj, such as plant-
ers, missionaries, traders, technicians, and so on among the whites;
and landlords, moneylenders, etc. among the natives. It was official
also in so far as it was meant primarily for administrative use — for the
information of government, for action on its part, and for the determi-
nation of its policy. Even when it incorporated statements emanating
from ‘the other side’, from the insurgents or their allies, for instance,
as it often did by way of direct or indirect reporting in the body of
official correspondence or even more characteristically as enclosures’
to the latter, this was done only as a part of an argument prompted by
administrative concern. In other words, whatever its particular form —
and there was indeed an amazing variety ranging from the exordial
letter, telegram, despatch, and communique to the terminal summary,
report, judgement, and proclamation — its production and circulation
were both necessarily contingent on reasons of State.

Yet another of the distinctive features of this type of discourse is its
immediacy. This derived from two conditions: first, that statements
of this class were written either concurrently with or soon after the
event, and secondly, that this was done by the participants concerned,
a participant’ being defined for this purpose in the broad sense of a
contemporary involved in the event either in action or indirectly as an
onlooker. This would exclude of course that genre of retrospective
writing in which, as in some memoirs, an event and its recall are sepa-
rated by a considerable hiatus, but would still leave a massive docu-
mentation— primary sources’ as it is known in the trade — to speak to
the historian with a sort of ancestral voice and make him feel close to
his subject.

The two specimens quoted below are fairly representative of this
type. One of these relates to the Barasat uprising of 1 83 1 and the other
to the Santal rebellion of 1855.

198

The Small Voice of History

TEXT l5

To the Deputy Adjutant General of the Army
Sir,

Authentic information having reached Government that a body of
Fanatic Insurgents are now committing the most daring and wanton
atrocities on the Inhabitants of the Country in the neighbourhood of
Tippy in the Magistracy of Baraset and have set at defiance and re-
pulsed the utmost force that the local Civil Authority could assemble
for their apprehension. I am directed by the Hon’ble Vice President in
Council to request that you will without delay Communicate to the
General Officer Commanding the Presidency Division the orders of
Government that one Complete Battalion of Native Infantry from
Barrackpore and two Six Pounders manned with the necessary com-
pliment \sic] of Golundaze from Dum Dum, the whole under the
Command of a Field Officer of judgement and decision, be immediately
directed to proceed and rendezvous at Baraset when they will be joined
by 1 Havildar and 1 2 Troopers of the 3rd Regiment of Light Cavalry
now forming the escort of the Hon’ble the Vice President.

2nd. The Magistrate will meet the Officer Commanding the Detach-
ment at Baraset and will afford the necessary information for his guid-
ance relative to the position of the Insurgents; but without having any
authority to interfere in such Military operations as the Commanding
Officer of the Detachments may deem expedient, for the purpose of
routing or seizing or in the event of resistance destroying those who
persevere in defying the authority of the State and disturbing the public
tranquil[l]ity.

3rd. It is concluded that the service will not be of such a protracted
nature as to require a larger supply of ammunition than may be carried
in Pouch and in two Tumbrils for the Guns, and that no difficulties will
occur respecting carriage. In the contrary event any aid needed will be
furnished.

5 BC 54222: JC 22 November 1831: ‘Extract from the Proceedings of the
Honorable the Vice President in Council in the Military Department under
date the 10th November 1831’. Emphasis added.

The Prose of Counter-Insurgency 199

4th. The Magistrate will be directed to give every assistance regard-
ing supplies and other requisites for the Troops.

Council Chamber 1 am & ca

10th November 1831 (Sd.) Wm. Casement Coll.

Secy, to Govt. Mily. Dept.

TEXT 26

From W.C. Taylor Esqre.

To F.S. Mudge Esqre.

Dated 7th July 1855

My dear Mudge,

There is a great gathering of Sontals 4 or 5000 men at a place about
8 miles off and I understand that they are all well armed with Bows and
arrows. Tulwars, Spears & ca. and that it is their intention to attack all
the Europeans round and plunder and murder them. The cause of all this
is that one of their Gods is supposed to have taken the Flesh and to haw
made his appearance at some place near thist and that it is his intention
to reign as a King over all this part of India , and has ordered the Sontals
to collect and put to death all the Europeans and influential Natives round.
As this is the nearest point to the gat he) ing I suppose it will be first attacked
and think it would be best for you to send notice to the authorities at
Berhampore and ask for military aid as it is not at all a nice look out
being murdered and as far as I can make out this is a rather serious affair.

Sreecond Yours & ca

7th July, 1 855 Signed /

W.C. Taylor

Nothing could be more immediate than these texts. Written as soon
as these events were acknowledged as rebellion by those who had the
most to fear from it, they are among the very first records we have on
them in the collections of the India Office Library and the West Bengal

6 /A 19 July 1855: Enclosure to letter from the Magistrate of Murshidabad,
dated 1 1 July 1855. Emphasis added.

200 The Small Voice of History

State Archives. As the evidence on the 1831 bidroha shows,7 it was not
until 1 0 November that the Calcutta authorities came to recognize the
violence reported from the Barasat region for what it was — a full-
blooded insurrection led by Titu Mir and his men. Colonel Casement s
letter identifies for us that moment when the hitherto unknown leader
of a local peasantry entered the lists against the Raj and thereby made
his way into history. The date of the other document too commemorates
a beginning — that of the Santal hool. It was on that very day, 7 July
1 855, that the assassination of Mahesh daroga following an encounter
between his police and peasants gathered at Bhagnadihi detonated the
uprising. The report was loud enough to register in that note scribbled
in obvious alarm at Sreecond by an European employee of the East
India Railway for the benefit of his colleague and the sarkar. Again,
these are words that convey as directly as possible the impact of a peas-
ant revolt on its enemies in its first sanguinary hours.

Ill

None of this instantaneousness percolates through to the next level —
that of the secondary discourse. The latter draws on primary discourse
as materiel but transforms it at the same time. To contrast the two types
one could think of the first as historiography in a raw, primordial state
or as an embryo yet to be articulated into an organism with discrete
limbs, and the second as the processed product, however crude the
processing, a duly constituted if infant discourse.

The difference is quite obviously a function of time. In the chrono-
logy of this particular corpus the secondary follows the primary at a
distance and opens up a perspective to turn an event into history in the
perception not only of those outside it but of the participants as well.
It was thus that Mark Thornhill, Magistrate of Mathura during the
summer of 1857, when a mutiny of the Treasury Guard sparked off
jacqueries all over the district, was to reflect on the altered status of his
own narrative in which he figured as a protagonist himself. Introducing
his well-known memoirs. The Personal Adventures And Experiences Of
A Magistrate During The Rise , Pr ogress, And Suppression Of The Indian

7 Thus, BC 54222: JC , 3 April 1 832: Alexander to Barwell, 28 November
1831.

201

The Prose of Counter-Insurgency

Mutiny (London: J 884), twenty-seven years after the event he wrote:
‘After the suppression of the Indian Mutiny, I commenced to write an
account of my adventures . . . by the time my narrative was completed,
the then interest of the public in the subject was exhausted. Years have
since passed, and an interest of another kind has arisen. The events of
thar time have become history, and to that history my story may prove
a contribution . . . I have therefore resolved to publish my narrative . . .’
Shorn of contemporaneity, a discourse is thus recovered as an element
of the past and classified as history. This change, aspectual as well as
categorial, sites it at the very intersection of colonialism and historio-
graphy, endowing it with a duplex character linked at the same time
to a system of power and the particular manner of its representation.

Its authorship is in itself witness to this intersection and Thornhill
was by no means the only administrator turned historian. He was
indeed one of many officials, civilian and military, who wrote retros-
pectively on popular disturbances in rural India under the Raj. Their
statements, taken together, fail into two classes. First, there were those
which were based on the writers’ own experience as participants.
Memoirs of one kind or another, these were written either at a consi-
derable delay after the events narrated or almost concurrently with
them but intended, unlike primary discourse, for a public readership.
The latter, an important distinction, shows how the colonialist mind
managed to serve Clio and counter-insurgency at the same time so that
the presumed neutrality of one could have hardly been left unaffected
by the passion of the other, a point to which we shall soon return.
Reminiscences of both kinds abound in the literature on the Mutiny,
which dealt with the violence of the peasantry (especially in the
North Western Provinces and Central India) no less than with that
of the sepoys. Accounts such as Thornhills, written long after the
event, were matched by near-contemporary ones such as Dunlops
Service and Adventure with Khakee Ressallah ; or Meerut Volunteer Horse
during the Mutinies of 1 857-58 (London: 1858) and Edwards’ Personal
Adventures during the Indian Rebellion in Rohilcund, Futtehghur, and
Oudh (London: 1858) to mention only two out of a vast outcrop in-
tended to cater for a public who could not have enough of tales of
horror and glory.

The other class of writings to qualify as secondary discourse is also
the work of administrators. They too addressed themselves to a pre-

202

The Small Voice of History

dominantly non-official readership but on themes not directly related
to their own experience. Their work includes some of the most widely
used and highly esteemed accounts of peasant uprisings written either
as monographs on particular events, such as Jamini Mohan Ghoshs on
the Sannyasi-and-Faqir disturbances and J.C. Prices on the Chuar
Rebellion, or as statements included in more comprehensive histories
like W.W. Hunters story of the Santal hool in The Annals of Rural
Bengal Apart from these there were those distinguished contribu-
tions made by some of the best minds in the Civil Service to the hist-
orical chapters of the District Gazetteers . Altogether, they constitute a
substantial body of writing which enjoys much authority with all
students of the subject and there is hardly any historiography at the
next, that is, tertiary, level of discourse that does not rely on these for
sustenance.

The prestige of this genre is to no mean extent due to the aura of
impartiality it has about it. By keeping their narrative firmly beyond
the pale of personal involvement these authors managed, if only by
implication, to confer on it a semblance of truth. As officials they were
carriers of the will of the state no doubt. But since they wrote about a
past in which they did not figure as functionaries themselves, their
statements are taken to be more authentic and less biased than those
of their opposite numbers whose accounts, based on reminiscences,
were necessarily contaminated by their intervention in rural disturbances
as agents of the Raj. By contrast rhe former are believed to have ap-
proached the narrated events from the outside. As observers separated
clinically from the site and subject of diagnosis they are supposed
to have found for their discourse a niche in that realm of perfect
neutrality — the realm of History — over which the Aorist and the
Third Person preside.

How valid is this claim to neutrality? For an answer we may not
take any bias for granted in this class of historical work from the mere
fact of its origin with authors committed to colonialism. To take that
as self-evident would be to deny historiography the possibility of
acknowledging its own inadequacies and thus defeat the purpose of the
present exercise. As should be clear from what follows, it is precisely
by refusing to prove what appears as obvious that historians of peasant
insurgency remain trapped — in the obvious. Criticism must therefore

The Prose of Counter-Insurgency 203

start not by naming a bias but by examining the components of the
discourse, vehicle of all ideology, for the manner in which these might
have combined to describe any particular figure of the past.

The components of both types of discourse and their varieties dis-
cussed so far are what we shall call segments. Made up of the same
linguistic material, that is strings of words of varying lengths, they are
of two kinds which may be designated, according to their function, as
indicative and interpretative. A gross differentiation, this is meant to
assign to them, within a given text, the role respectively of reporting
and explaining. This however does not imply their mutual segrega-
tion. On the contrary they are often found embedded in each other not
merely as a matter of fact but of necessity.

One can see in Texts 1 and 2 how such imbrication works. In both
of them the straight print stands for the indicative segments and the
italics for the interpretative. Laid out according to no particular pat-
tern in either of these letters they interpenetrate and sustain each other
in order to give the documents their meaning, and in the process
endow some of the strings with an ambiguity that is inevitably lost in
this particular manner of typographical representation. However, the
rough outline of a division of functions between the two classes emer-
ges even from this schema — the indicative stating (that is reporting)
the actual and anticipated actions of the rebels and their enemies, and
the interpretative commenting on them in order to understand (that
is to explain) their significance.

The difference between them corresponds to that between the two
basic components of any historical discourse which, following Roland
Barthes’ terminology, we shall call junctions and indices ,8 The former
are segments that m ake up the li near sequence of a narrative. Contiguous,
they operate in a relation of solidarity in the sense of mutually implying
each other and add up to increasingly larger strings which combine to

8 My debt to Roland Barthes for many of the analytic terms and procedures
used in this section and generally throughout this essay should be far too obvi-
ous to all familiar with his ‘Structural Analysis of Narratives' and ‘The Struggle
with the Angel', in Barthes, Image-Music-Text (Glasgow: 1977), pp. 79-141,
and ‘Historical Discourse', in M. Lane (ed.), Structuralism: A Reader (London:
1970), pp. 145-55, to require detailed reference except where I quote directly
from this lirerature.

204

The Small Voice of History

produce the aggregative statement. The latter may thus be regarded as
a sum of micro-sequences to each of which, however important or
otherwise, it should be possible to assign names by a metalinguistic
operation using terms that may or may not belong to the text under
consideration. It is thus that the functions of a folktale have been
named by Bremond, after Propp, as Fraud \ Betrayal Struggle , Contract ,
etc. and those of a triviality such as the offer of a cigarette in a James
Bond story designated by Barthes as offering, accepting, lighting, and
smoking, . One may perhaps take a cue from this procedure to define a
historical statement as a discourse with a name subsuming a given
number of named sequences. Hence it should be possible to speak of
a hypothetical narrative called ‘The Insurrection ofTitu Mir* made up
of a number of sequences including Text 1 quoted above.

Let us give this document a name and call it, say, Calcutta Coun-
cil Acts. (Alternatives such as Outbreak of Violence or Army Called Up
should also do and be analysable in terms corresponding to, though
not identical with, those which follow.) In broad terms the message
Calcutta Council Acts (C) in our text can be read as a combination of
two groups of sequences called alarm (a) and intervention (b), each of
which is made up of a pair of segments — the former of insurrection
breaks out (a') and information received (a") and the latter of decision
to call up army (b') and order issued (b"), one of the constituents in
each pair being represented in its turn by yet another linked series —
(a') by atrocities committed (ai) and authority defied U2), and (b") by
infantry to proceed (bj), artillery to support (b2) and magistrate to co-
operate (b3). In other words the narrative in this document can be

written up in three equivalent steps so that

C = (a + b) I

= (a' + a") + (b'+b") II

= (*i ■+ a2) + a" + b' + (bi + b2 + b^) Ill

It should be clear from this arrangement that not all the elements of
step II can be expressed in micro -sequences of the same order. Hence
we are left at step III with a concatenation in which segments drawn
from different levels of the discourse are imbricated to constitute a
roughly hewn and uneven structure. In so far as functional units of the

The Prose of Counter-Insurgency 205

lowest denomination like these are what a narrative has as its syn tagmatic
relata, its course can never be smooth. The hiatus between the loosely
cobbled segments is necessarily charged with uncertainty, with moments
of risk’, and every micro-sequence terminates by opening up alternat-
ive possibilities, only one of which is picked up by the next sequence
as it carries on with the story. ‘Du Pont, Bonds future partner, of-
fers him a light from his lighter but Bond refuses; the meaning of this
bifurcation is that Bond instinctively fears a booby-trapped gadget.*9
What Barthes identifies thus as ‘bifurcation in fiction, has its parallels
in historical discourse as well. The alleged commitment of atrocities
(aj) in that official despatch of 1831 cancels out the belief in the
peaceful propagation of Titus new doctrine which had already been
known to the authorities but ignored so far as inconsequential. The
expression, authority defied (a2), which refers to the rebels having ‘set
at defiance and repulsed the utmost force that the local Civil Authority
could assemble for their apprehension , has as its other if unstated term
his efforts to persuade the Government by petition and deputation to
offer redress for the grievances of his co-religionists. And so on. Each
of these elementary functional units thus implies a node which has not
quite materialized into an actual development, a sort of zero sign by
means of which the narrative affirms its tension. And precisely because
history as the verbal representation by man of his own past is by its very
nature so full of hazard, so replete indeed with the verisimilitude of
sharply differentiated choices, that it never ceases to excite. The hist-
orical discourse is the world s oldest thriller.

Sequential analysis thus shows a narrative to be a concatenation of not
so closely aligned functional units. The latter are dissociative in their
operation and emphasize the analytic rather than the synthetic aspect
of a discourse. As such they are not what, by themselves, generate irs
meaning. Just as the sense of a word (e.g. ‘man’) is not fractionally
represented in each of the letters (e.g. M, A, N) which make up its gra-
phic image, nor of a phrase (e.g. ‘once upon a time’) in its constituting

9 Barthes, Image-Music- Text, p. 102.

206

The Small Voice of History

words taken separately, so also the individual segments of a discourse
cannot on their own tell us what it signifies. Meaning in each instance
is the work of a process of integration which complements that of
sequential articulation. As Benveniste has put it, in any language ‘it is
dissociation which divulges to us its formal constitution and integration
its signifying units.’10

This is true of the language of history as well. The integrative ope-
ration is carried out in its discourse by the other class of basic narrat-
ive units, that is, indices . A necessary and indispensable correlate of
functions , they are distinguished from the latter in some important
respects:

Indices because of the vertical nature of their relations are truly seman-
tic units: unlike ‘functions’ . . . they refer to a signified, not to an ‘ope-
ration’. The ratification of indices is ‘higher up’ ... a paradigmatic
ratification. That of functions, by contrast, is always ‘further on, is a
syntagmatic ratification. Functions and indices thus overlay another
classic distinction: functions involve metonymic relata, indices meta-
phoric relata; the former correspond to a functionality of doing, the
latter to a functionality of being.1 1

The vertical intervention of indices in a discourse is possible because
of the disruption of its linearity by a process corresponding to dystaxia
in the behaviour of many natural languages. Bally, who has studied this
phenomenon in much detail, finds that one of several conditions of
its occurrence in French is ‘when parts of the same sign are separat-
ed’ so that the expression, ‘“elle a pardonn^” taken in the negative, is
splintered and reassembled as “elle nenous a jamais plus pardonnf' .’,2

,0 fimile Benveniste, ProbUmes de linguistique gbierale, I (Paris: 1966),
p. 1 26. The origi nal , (la dissociation nous livre la constitution formeUe; Tintfgmtion
nous livre des unites signifiantes\ has been rendered somewhat differently and, I
feel, less happily, in the English translation of the work, Problems in General
Linguistics (Florida: 1971), p. 107.

11 Barthes, Image-Music-Text , p. 93.

12 Charles Bally, Linguistique GMraU et Linguistique Francaise (Berne:
1965), p. 144.

207

The Prose of Counter-Insurgency

Similarly the simple predictive in Bengali ‘ shejabe can be rewritten
by the insertion of an interrogative or a string of negative conditionals
between the two words to produce respectively she ki jabe’ and ‘she na
hoy na jabe’.

In a historical narrative too it is a process of ‘distension and ex-
pansion of its syntagm which helps paradigmatic elements to infiltrate
and reconstitute its discrete segments into a meaningful whole. It is
precisely thus that the co-ordination of the metonymic and metaphori-
cal axes is brought about in a statement and the necessary interaction
of its functions and indices actualized. However, these units are not
distributed in equal proportions in all texts: some have a greater in-
cidence of one kind than of the other. As a result a discourse could
be either predominantly metonymic or metaphorical depending on
whether a significantly larger number of irs components are syntagmati-
cally ratified or paradigmatically.13 Our Text I is of the first type. One
can see the formidable and apparently impenetrable array of its
metonymic relata in step III of the sequential analysis given above.
Here at last we have the perfect authentication of the idiots view of
history as one damn’d thing after another: rising-information-decision-
order \ However, a closer look at the text can detect chinks which have
allowed ‘comment* to worm its way through the plate armour of ‘fact*.
The italicized expressions are witness to this paradigmatic interven-
tion and indeed its measure. Indices, they play the role of adjectives or
epithets as opposed to verbs which, to speak in terms of homology
between sentence and narrative, is the role of functions.14 Working
intimately together with the latter they make the despatch into
more than a mere register of happenings and help to inscribe into it a
meaning, an interpretation so that the protagonists emerge from it
not as peasants but as ‘ Insurgents , not as Musalman but as fanatic ;
their action not as resistance to the tyranny of the rural elite but as ‘ the
most daring and wanton atrocities on the inhabitants' ; their project not
as a revolt against zamindari but as ‘ defying the authority of the State\
not as a search for an alternative order in which the peace of the

13 Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology (London: 1967), p. 60.

14 Barthes, Image-Music-Text , p. 128.

208 The Small Voice of History

countryside would not be violated by the officially condoned anarchy
of semi-feudal landlordism but as ‘ disturbing the public tranquil[l]ity\
If the intervention of indices substitutes meaning for the straight-
forward copy of the events recounted' 1 5 in a text so charged with meto-
nymy as the one discussed above, it may be trusted to do so to an even
greater degree in discourses which are predominantly metaphorical.
This should be evident from Text 2 where the element of comment,
italicized by us, largely outweighs that of report. If the latter is re-
presented as a concatenation of three functional sequences, namely,
armed Santals gathering , authorities to be alerted \ and military aid re -
quested \ it can be seen how the first of these has been separated from
the rest by the insertion of a large chunk of explanatory material and
how the others too are enveloped and sealed off by comment. The
latter is inspired by the fear that Sreecond being The nearest point to the
gathering . . . will be first attacked and of course ‘it is not at all a nice
look out being murdered Notice, however, that this fear justifies itself
politically, that is, by imputing to the Santals an 4 intention to attack . . .
plunder . . . and put to death all the Europeans and influential Natives'
so that ‘one of their Gods' in human form may ‘ reign as a King overall
this part of India' Thus, this document is not neutral in its attitude to
the events witnessed and, put up as ‘evidence* before the court of
history, it can hardly be expected to testify with impartiality. On the
contrary it is the voice of committed colonialism. It has already made
a choice between the prospect of Santal self-rule in Damin-i-Koh and
the continuation of the British Raj and identifies what is alleged-
ly good for the promotion of one as fearsome and catastrophic for the
other — as ‘ a rather serious affair . In other words the indices in this
discourse — as well as in the one discussed above — introduce us to a
particular code so constituted that for each of its signs we have an
antonym, a counter-message, in another code. To borrow a binary
representation made famous by Mao Tse-tung,16 the reading, Tts
terrible !’ for any element in one must show up in the other as Tts
fine f for a corresponding element and vice versa. To put this clash of
codes graphically one can arrange the indices italicized below of Texts

15 Ibid., p. 119.

16 Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung , vol. I (Peking: 1967), pp. 26-7.

209

The Prose of Counter-Insurgency

1 and 2 in a matrix called ‘TERRIBLE* (in conformity to the adjectival
attribute of units of this class) in such a way as to indicate their map-
ping into the implied, though unstated terms (given in straight types)
of a corresponding matrix ‘FINE*.

TERRIBLE

FINE

Insurgent}

peasants

fanatic

Islamic puritan

daring and wanton atrocities on the Inhabitants

resistance to oppression

defying the authority of the State

revolt against zamindar

disturbing the public tranquil[l]ity

struggle for a better order

intention to attack , etc.

intention to punish

oppressors

one of their Gods to reign as a King

Santal self-rule

What comes out of the interplay of these mutually implied but op-
posed matrices is that our texts are not the record of observations un-
contaminated by bias, judgement, and opinion. On the contrary, they
speak of a total complicity. For if the expressions in the right-hand
column taken together may be said to stand for insurgency — the code
which contains all signifiers of the subaltern practice of ‘turning things
upside down and the consciousness that informs it — then the other
column must stand for its opposite, that is, counter-insurgency. The
antagonism between the two is irreducible and there is nothing in this
to leave room for neutrality. Hence these documents make no sense
except in terms of a code of pacification which, under the Raj, was a
complex of coercive intervention by the State and its protdgds, the
native elite, with arms and words. Representatives of the primary type
of discourse in the historiography of peasant revolts, these are specimens
of the prose of counter-insurgency.

How far does secondary discourse too share such commitment? Is it
possible for it to speak any other prose than that of a counter-insur-
gency? Those narratives of this category in which their authors figure
among the protagonists are of course suspect almost by definition.

210 The Small Voice of History

and the presence of the grammatical first person in these must be ack-
nowledged as a sign of complicity. The question however is whether
the loss of objectivity on this account is adequately made up by the
consistent use of the aorist in such writings. For as Benveniste observes,
the historical utterance admits of three variations of the past tense —
that is, the aorist, the imperfect, and the pluperfect, and of course the
present is altogether excluded. 17 This condition is indeed satisfied by
reminiscences separated by a long enough hiatus from the events con-
cerned. What has to be found out therefore is the extent to which the
force of the preterite corrects the bias caused by the absence of the third
person.

Mark Thornhills memoirs of the Mutiny provide us with a text in
which the author looks back at a series of events he had experienced
twenty-seven years ago. ‘The events of that time’ had ‘turned into hist-
ory’ and he intends, as he says in the extract quoted above, to make a
contribution ‘to that history’, and thus produce what we have defined
as a particular kind of secondary discourse. The difference inscribed
in it by that interval is perhaps best grasped by comparing it with some
samples of primary discourse we have on the same subject from the
same author. Two of these may be read together as a record of his per-
ception of what happened at the Mathura sadar station and the sur-
rounding countryside between 14 May and 3 June 1857. 18 Written
by him donning the district magistrates topee and addressed to his
superiors — one on 5 June 1857, that is, within forty-eight hours of
the terminal date of the period under discussion, and the other on
1 0 August 1 858 when the events were still within vivid recall as a very
recent past — these letters coincide in scope with that of the narrative
covering the same three weeks in the first ninety pages of his book,
written nearly three decades later donning the historians hat.

The letters are both predominantly metonymic in character.
Originating as they did almost from within the related experience itself
they are necessarily foreshortened and tell the reader in breathless
sequences about some of the happenings of that extraordinary summer.
The syntagm thus takes on a semblance of factuality with hardly any

17 Benveniste, op. cit., p. 239.

18 Freedom Struggle in Uttar Pradesh , vol. V, pp. 685-92.

211

The Prose of Counter-Insurgency

room in it for comment. Yet here again the welding of the functional
units can be seen, on close inspection, to be less solid than at first sight.
Embedded in them there are indices revealing the anxieties of the local
custodian of law and order (‘the state of the district generally is such
as to defy all control ; the law is at a standstill ), his fears {'very alarm-
ing tumours of the approach of the rebel army’), his moral disappro-
bation of the activities of the armed villagers (‘the disturbances in the
district . . . increasing . . . in . . . enormity ), his appreciation by con-
trast of the native collaborators hostile to the insurgents (‘the Seths’
house . . . received us most kindly). Indices such as these are ideological
birthmarks displayed prominently on much of this type of material
relating to peasant revolts. Indeed, taken together with some other
relevant textual features — e.g. the abrupt mode of address in these
documents so revealing of the shock and terror generated by the
imeute — they accuse all such allegedly ‘objective’ evidence on the
militancy of the rural masses to have been tainted at its source by the
prejudice and partisan outlook of their enemies. If historians fail to
take notice of these telltale signs branded on the staple of their trade,
that is a fact which must be explained in terms of the optics of a
colonialist historiography rather than construed in favour of the pre-
sumed objectivity of their ‘primary sources’.

There is nothing immediate or abrupt about the corresponding
secondary discourse. On the contrary it has various perspectives built
into it to give it a depth in time and, following from this temporal
determination, its meaning. Compare for instance the narration of
events in the two versions for any particular day — for, say, 14 May
1857 at the very beginning of our three-week period. Written up in
a very short paragraph of fifty-seven words in Thornhills letter of
10 August 1858 this can be represented fully in four pithy segments
without any significant loss of message: mutineers approaching; infor-
mation received from Gurgaon; confirmed by Europeans north of the
district; women and non-combatants sent off to Agra. Since the account
starts, for all practical purposes, with this entry, there are no exordia
to serve as its context, giving this instant take-off the sense, as we have
noticed, of a total surprise. In the book however that same instant
is provided with a background spread over four and a half months
and three pages (pp. 1-3). All of this time and space is devoted to some

212

The Small Voice of History

carefully chosen details of the authors life and experience in the per-
iod preceding the Mutiny. These are truly significant \ As indices they
prepare the reader for what is to come and help him to understand the
happenings of 14 May and after, when these enter into the narrative
at staggered stages. Thus the mysterious circulation of chapatis in
January and the silent but expressive concern on the narrator’s brother,
a high official, over a telegram received at Agra on 1 2 May conveying
the still unconfirmed news of the Meerut uprising, portend the deve-
lopments two days later at his own district headquarters. Again the
trivia about his ‘large income and great authority’, his house, horses,
servants, a chest full of silver plate, which stood in the hall and ... a
great store of Cashmere shawls, pearls, and diamonds’ all help to index,
by contrast, the holocaust which was soon to reduce his authority to
nothing, and turn his servants into rebels, his house into a shambles,
his property into booty for the plundering poor of town and country.
By anticipating narrated events thus, if only by implication, secondary
discourse destroys the entropy of the first, its raw material. Henceforth
there will be nothing in the story that can be said to be altogether un-
expected.

This effect is the work of the so-called ‘organization shifters’19
which help the author to superimpose a temporal! ty of his own on that
of his theme, that is, ‘to “dechronologize” the historical thread and re-
store, if only by way of reminiscence or nostalgia, a Time at once com-
plex, parametric, and non-linear . . . braiding the chronology of the
subject-matter with that of the language-act which reports it.’ In the
present instance the ‘braiding’ consists not only in fitting an evocative
context to the bare sequence related in that short paragraph of his
letter. The shifters disrupt the syn tagm twice to insert in the breach, on
both occasions, a moment of authorial time suspended between the
two poles of ‘waiting’, a figure ideally constituted to allow the play
of digressions, asides, and parentheses forming loops, and zigzags in

19 For Roman Jakobsons exposition of this key concept, see his Selected
Writings , 2: Word and Language (The Hague and Pari?: 1 971 ), pp. 130-47.
Barthes develops the notion of organization shifters in his essay ‘Historical
Discourse’, pp. 1 46-8. All extracts quoted in this paragraph are taken from that
essay unless otherwise mentioned.

213

The Prose of Counter-Insurgency

a story-line and adding thereby to its depth. Thus, waiting for news
about the movements of the mutineers, he reflects on the peace of the
early evening at the sadar station and stray s from his account to tell us
in violation of the historiographical canon of tense and person: ‘The
scene was simple and full of the repose of Eastern life. In the times that
followed it often recurred to my memory.’ And, again, waiting later on
for transport to take away the evacuees gathered in his drawing room,
he withdraws from that particular night for the duration of a few words
to comment: ‘It was a beautiful room, brightly lighted, gay with flow-
ers. It was the last time I thus saw it, and so it remains impressed on
my memory.’

How far does the operation of these shifters help to correct the bias
resulting from the writer’s intervention in the first person? Not much
by this showing. For each of the indices wedged into the narrative
represents a principled choice between the terms of a paradigmatic
opposition. Between the authority of the head of the district and
its defiance by the armed masses, between the habitual servility of
his menials and their assertion of self-respect as rebels, between the
insignia of his wealth and power (e.g. gold, horses, shawls, bungalow)
and their appropriation or destruction by the subaltern crowds,
the author, hardly differentiated from the administrator that he was
twenty-seven years ago, consistently chooses the former. Nostalgia
makes the choice all the more eloquent — a recall of what is thought to
be ‘fine* such as a peaceful evening or an elegant room emphasizing by
contrast the ‘terrible’ aspects of popular violence directed against the
Raj. Quite clearly there is a logic to this preference. It affirms itself by
negating a series of inversions which, combined with other signs of the
same order, constitute a code of insurgency. The pattern of the hist-
orians choice, identical with the magistrates, conforms thus to a
counter-code, the code of counter-insurgency.

VII

If the neutralizing effect of the aorist fails thus to prevail over the
subjectivity of the protagonist as narrator in this particular genre of
secondary discourse, how does the balance of tense and person stand
in the other kind of writing within the same category? One can see two

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The Small Voice of History

distinct idioms at work here, both identified with the standpoint of
colonialism but unlike each other in expressing it. The cruder variety
is well exemplified in The Chuar Rebellion of 1 799 by J.C. Price. Writ-
ten long after the event, in 1 874, it was obviously meant by the author,
Settlement Officer of Midnapur at the time, to serve as a straightforward
historical account with no particular administrative end in view. He
addressed it to ‘the casual reader’ as well as to any ‘future Collector of
Midnapore*, hoping to share with both ‘that keen interest which I
have felt as I have read the old Midnapore records.’20 But the author’s
‘delight . . . experienced in poring over these papers’ seems to have
produced a text almost indistinguishable from the primary discourse
used as its source. The latter is, for one thing, conspicuous by its sheer
physical presence. Over a fifth of that half of the book which deals
specifically with the events of 1799 is made up of direct quotations
from those records and another large part of barely modified extracts.
More important for us, however, is the evidence we have of the authors
identification of his own sentiments with those of that small group of
whites who were reaping the whirlwind produced by a violently
disruptive change the Company’s Government had sown in the south-
western corner of Bengal. Only the fear of the beleaguered officials at
Midnapur station in 1799 turns seventy-five years later into that
genocidal hatred characteristic of a genre of post-Mutiny British writ-
ing. ‘The disinclination of the authorities, civil or military, to proceed
in person to help to quell the disturbances is most striking’, he writes,
shaming his compatriots, and then goes on to brag:

In these days of breech-loaders half a dozen Europeans would have
been a match for twenty times their number of Chuars. Of course
with the imperfect nature of the weapons of that day it could not be
expected that Europeans would fruitlessly rush into danger, but I
should have expected that the European officers of the station would
have in some instances at least courted and met an attack in person and
repulsed their assailants. I wonder that no one European officer, civil-
ian or military, wirh the exception of perhaps Lieutenant Gill, owned
to that sensation of joyous excitement most young men feel nowa-
days in field sports, or in any pursuit where there is an element of

20 Price, op. cit., p. dx.

215

The Prose of Counter-Insurgency

danger. I think most of us, had we lived in 1799, would have coun-
ted it better sport had we bagged a marauding Chuar reeking with
blood and spoils, than the largest bear that the Midnapore jungles can
produce.21

Quite clearly the authors separation from his subject matter and the
difference between the time of the event and that of its narration here
have done little to inspire objectivity in him. His passion is apparent-
ly of the same order as that of the British soldier who wrote on the
eve of the sack of Delhi in 1 857: ‘I most sincerely trust that the order
given when we attack Delhi will be . . . “Kill every one; no quarter is
to be given”.’22 The historians attitude to rebels is in this instance in-
distinguishable from that of the State — rhe attitude of the hunter to
his quarry. Regarded thus an insurgent is not a subject of understanding
or interpretation but of extermination, and the discourse of history,
far from being neutral, serves directly to instigate official violence.

There were however other writers working within the same genre
who are known to have expressed themselves in a less sanguinary
idiom. They are perhaps best represented by W.W. Hunter and his
account of the Santal insurrection of 1855 in The Annals of Rural
Bengal [ It is, in many respects, a remarkable text. Written within a
decade of the Mutiny and twelve years of the hool,23 it has none of that
revanchist and racist overtone common to a good deal of Anglo-Indian
literature of the period. Indeed the author treats the enemies of the Raj
not only with consideration but with respect although they had wiped
it off from three eastern districts in a matter of weeks and held out for
five months against the combined power of the colonial army and
its newly acquired auxiliaries — railways and the electric telegraph’.
One of the first modern exercises in the historiography of Indian peas-
ant revolts, it situates the uprising in a cultural and socio-economic

21 Ibid.

22 Reginald C. Wilberforce, An Unrecorded Chapter of the Indian Mutiny
(2nd edition; London: 1894), pp. 76-7.

23 It appears from a note in this work that parts of it were written in 1 866.
The dedication bears rhe date 4 March 1 868. All our references to this work in
quotation or otherwise are to chapter IV of the seventh edition (London: 1 897)
unless otherwise stated.

2 1 6 The Small Voice of History

context, analyses its causes, and draws on local records and contempo-
rary accounts for evidence about its progress and eventual suppression.
Here, to all appearances, we have that classic instance of the authors
own bias and opinion dissolving under the operation of the past tense
and the grammatical third person. Here, perhaps, historical discourse
has come to its own and realized that ideal of an apersonal . . . mode
of narrative . . . designed to wipe our the presence of the speaker.’24

This semblance of objectivity, of the want of any obviously demons-
trable bias, has however nothing to do with ‘facts speaking for them-
selves’ in a state of pure metonymy unsullied by comment. On the
contrary the text is packed with comment. One has to compare it with
something like the near-contemporary article on this subject in the
Calcutta Review ( 1 856) or even K.K. Datta’s history of the hool written
long after its suppression to realize how little there is in it of the details
of what actually happened.25 Indeed the narration of the event occu-
pies in the book only about 7 per cent of the chapter which builds up
climactically towards it, and somewhat less than 50 per cent of the
print devoted specifically to this topic within that chapter. The syn-
tagm is broken up again and again by dystaxia and interpretation filters
through to assemble the segments into a meaningful whole of a prim-
arily metaphorical character. The consequence of this operation that
is most relevant for our purpose here is the way in which it distributes
the paradigmatic relata along an axis of historical continuity between
a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ , forelengthening it with a context and extending
it into a perspective. The representation of insurgency ends up thus by
having its moment intercalated between its past and future so that the
particular values of one and the other are rubbed into the event to give
it the meaning specific to it.

VIII

To turn first to the context, two- thirds of the chapter which culminates
in the history of the insurrection is taken up with an inaugural account

24 Barthes, Image-Music- Text, p. 112.

15 Anon., The Sonthal Rebellion, Calcutta Review (1856), pp. 223-64;
K.K. Datta, ‘The Santal Insurrection of 1855-5?’. in Anti-British Plots and
Movements before 1857 (Meerut: 1970), pp. 43-152.

217

The Prose of Counter-Insurgency

of what may be called the natural history of its protagonists. An essay
in ethnography, this deals with the physical traits, language, traditions,
myths, religion, rituals, habitat, environment, hunting and agricul-
tural practices, social organization and communal government of
the Santals of the Birbhum region. There are many details here which
index the coming conflict as one of contraries, as between the noble
savage of the hills and mean exploiters from the plains — references to
his personal dignity (‘He does not abase himself to the ground like the
rural Hindu; the Santal woman is ‘ignorant of the shrinking squeamish-
ness of the Hindu female, etc.) implying by contrast his would-be
reduction to servitude by Hindu moneylenders, his honesty (‘Unlike
the Hindu, he never thinks of making money by a stranger, scrupulously
avoids all topics of business, and feels pained if payment is pressed
upon him for the milk and fruit which his wife brings out’), the greed
and fraud of the alien traders and landlords leading eventually to the
insurrection, his aloofness (‘The Santals live as much apart as possible
from the Hindus ), the dikus intrusion into his life and territory, and
the holocaust which inevitably followed.

These indices give the uprising not only a moral dimension and
the values of a just war, but also a depth in time. The latter is realized
by the operation of diachronic markers in the text — an imaginary
past by creation myths (appropriate for an enterprise taken up on the
Thakurs advice) and a real but remote past (befitting a revolt steeped
in Tradition) by the sherds of prehistory in ritual and speech with the
Santals’ ceremony of ‘Purifying for the Dead’ mentioned, for instance,
as the trace of a faint remembrance of the far-off time when they dwelt
beside great rivers’, and their language as ‘that intangible record on
which a nation’s past is graven more deeply than on brass tablets or rock
inscriptions.’

Moving closer to the event the author provides it with a recent past
covering roughly a period of sixty years of ‘direct administration in the
area. The moral and temporal aspects of the narrative merge here in the
figure of an irreconcilable contradiction. On the one hand there were,
according to Hunter, a series of beneficial measures introduced by the
government — the Decennial Settlement helping to expand the area
under cultivation and induce the Santals, since 1 792, to hire themselves
out as agricultural labourers; the setting up, in 1832, of an enclosure

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The Small Voice of History

ringed off by masonry pillars where they could colonize virgin land
and jungle without fear of harassment from hostile tribes; the deve-
lopment of ‘English enterprise’ in Bengal in the form of indigo
factories for which ‘the Santal immigrants afforded a population of
day-labourers; and last but not the least of bonanzas, their absorption
by thousands into labour gangs for the construction of railways across
that region in 1854. But there were, on the other hand, two sets of
factors which combined to undo all the good resulting from colonial
rule, namely, the exploitation and oppression of the Santals by greedy
and fraudulent Hindu landlords, moneylenders, and traders, and the
failure of the local administration, its police, and the courts to protect
them or redress the wrongs they suffered.

This emphasis on contradiction serves an obviously interpretative
purpose for the author. It makes it possible for him to locate the cause
of the uprising in a failure of the Raj to make its ameliorative aspects
prevail over the still lingering defects and shortcomings in its exercise
of authority. The account of the event therefore fits directly into the
objective stated at the beginning of the chapter, that is, to interest
not only the scholar ‘in these lapsed races’ but the statesman as well.
‘The Indian statesman will discover’, he had written there referring
euphemistically to the makers of British policy in India, ‘that these
Children of the Forest are . . . amenable to the same reclaiming in-
fluences as other men, and that upon their capacity for civilisation the
future extension of English enterprise in Bengal in a large measure
depends.’ It is this concern for ‘reclamation (shorthand for accelerat-
ing the transformation of the tribal peasantry into wage labour and
harnessing them to characteristically colonialist projects for the ex-
ploitation of Indian resources) which explains the mixture of firmness
and understanding’ in Hunter’s attitude to the rebellion. A liberal-
imperalist, he regarded it both as a menace to the stability of the Raj
and as a useful critique of its far-from-perfect administration. So while
he censured the government of the day for not declaring martial law
soon enough in order to cut down the hool at its inception, he was
careful to differentiate himself from those of his compatriots who
wanted to punish the entire Santal community for the crime of its

The Prose of Counter-Insurgeruy 2 1 9

rebels and deport overseas the population of the districts involved. A
genuinely far-sighted imperialist, he looked forward to the day when
the tribe, like many other aboriginal peoples of the subcontinent,
would demonstrate its capacity for civilisation by acting as an in-
exhaustible source of cheap labour power.

This vision is inscribed into the perspective wi th which the narration
ends. Blaming the outbreak of the hool squarely on that cheap and
practical administration* which paid no heed to the Santals* complaints
and concentrated on tax collection alone, it goes on to catalogue the
somewhat illusory benefits of ‘the more exact system that was introduced
after the revolt* to keep the power of the usurers over debtors within
the limits of the law, check the use of false weights and measures in
retail trade, and ensure the right of bonded labourers to choose free-
dom by desertion or change of employers. But more than administrat-
ive reform it was ‘English enterprise* again which radically contributed
to the welfare of the tribe. The railways ‘completely changed the rela-
tion of labour to capital* and did away with that ‘natural reason for
slavery — to wit, the absence of a wage-fund for free workmen.* The
demand for plantation labour in the Assam tea-districts ‘was destined
still further to improve the position of the Santals* and so was the sti-
mulus for indenturing coolies for the Mauritius and the Caribbeans.
It was thus that the tribal peasant prospered, thanks to the development
of a vast subcontinental and overseas labour market within the British
empire. In the Assam tea gardens ‘his whole family gets employment,
and every additional child, instead of being the means of increasing his
poverty, becomes a source of wealth*, while the coolies returned from
Africa or the West Indies ‘at the expiry of their contracts with savings
averaging £20 sterling, a sum sufficient to set up a Santa! as a consider-
able proprietor in his own village.*

Many of these so-called improvements were, as we know now look-
ing back at them across a century, the result of sheer wishful thinking
or so ephemeral as not to have mattered at all. The connection between
usury and bonded labour continued all through British rule well into
independent India. The freedom of the labour market was seriously
restricted by the want of competition between British and indigenous
capital. The employment of tribal families on tea plantations became
a source of cynical exploitation of the labour of women and children.
The advantages of mobility and contractuality were cancelled out by

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The Small Voice of History

irregularities in the process of recruitment and the manipulation of the
contrary factors of economic dependence and social differentiation by
arkatis. The system of indenturing helped rather less to liberate servile
labour than to develop a sort of second serfdom, and so on.

Yet this vision which never materialized offers an insight into the
character of this type of discourse. The perspective it inspired amounted
in effect to a testament of faith in colonialism. The hool was assimilat-
ed there to the career of the Raj and the militant enterprise of a tribal
peasantry to free themselves from the triple yoke of sarkari, sahukari ,
and zamindari to ‘English enterprise5 — the infrastructure of empire.
Hence the objective stated at the beginning of the account could be
reiterated towards the end with the author saying that he had written
at least ‘partly for the instruction which their [the Santals5] recent
history furnishes as to the proper method of dealing with the aborigi-
nal races.5 The suppression of local peasant revolts was a part of this
method, but it was incorporated now in a broader strategy designed to
tackle the economic problems of the British Government in India as
an element of the global problems of imperial politics. ‘These are the
problems5, says Hunter in concluding the chapter, ‘which Indian
statesmen during the next fifty years will be called upon to solve. Their
predecessors have given civilisation to India; it will be their duty to
render that civilisation at once beneficial to the natives and safe for
ourselves.5 In other words this historiography was assigned a role in a
political process that would ensure the security of the Raj by a com-
bination of force to crush rebellion when it occurred and reform to
pre-empt it by wrenching the tribal peasantry out of their rural bases
and distributing them as cheap labour power for British capital to
exploit in India and abroad. The overtly aggressive and nervous prose
of counter-insurgency born of the worries of the early colonial days
came thus to adopt in this genre of historical writing the firm but
benign, authoritarian but understanding, idiom of a mature and self-
assured imperialism.

How is it that even the more liberal type of secondary discourse is
unable thus to extricate itself from the code of counter-insurgency?

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The Prose of Counter-Insurgency

With all the advantage he has of writing in the third person and addres-
sing a distinct past, the official-turned-historian is still far from being
impartial where official interests are concerned. His sympathies for
the peasants’ sufferings and his understanding of what goaded them to
revolt do not, when the crunch comes, prevent him from siding with
law and older and justifying the transfer of the campaign against the
hool from civilian to military hands in order to crush it completely
and quickly. And as discussed above, his partisanship over the outcome
of the rebellion is matched by his commitment to the aims and in-
terests of the regime. The discourse of history, hardly distinguished
from policy, ends up by absorbing the concerns and objectives of the
latter.

In this affinity with policy historiography reveals its character as
a form of colonialist knowledge . That is, it derives directly from that
knowledge which the bourgeoisie had used in the period of their as-
cendancy to interpret the world in order to master it and establish
their hegemony over Western societies, but turned into an instrument
of national oppression as they began to acquire for themselves a place
in the sun . It was thus that political science, which had defined the
ideal of citizenship for European nation-states, was used in colonial
India to set up institutions and frame laws designed specifically to
generate a mitigated and second class citizenship. Political economy
which had developed in Europe as a critique of feudalism was made
to promote a neo-feudal landlordism in India. Historiography too
adapted itself to the relations of power under the Raj and was harnessed
more and more to the service of the state.

It was thanks to this connection and a good deal of talent to back
it up that historical writing on themes of the colonial period shaped
up as a highly coded discourse. Operating within the framework of a
many-sided affirmation of British rule in the subcontinent, it assumed
the function of representing the recent past of its people as "England’s
Work in India. A discourse of power in its own right, it had each of
its moments displayed as a triumph, that is, as the most favourable
upshot of a number of conflicting possibilities for the regime at any
particular time. In its mature form, therefore, as in Hunters Annuls*
continuity figures as one of its necessary and cardinal aspects. Unlike
primary discourse it cannot afford to be foreshortened and without a

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sequel. The event does not constitute its sole content, but is the middle
term between a beginning which serves as a context and an end which
is at the same time a perspective linked to the next sequence. The only
element that is constant in this ongoing series is the empire and the
policies needed to safeguard and perpetuate it.

Functioning as he does within this code Hunter, with all the good-
will so solemnly announced in his dedicatory note (‘These pages . . .
have little to say touching the governing race. My business is with the
people'), writes up the history of a popular struggle as one in which the
real subject is not the people but, indeed, ‘the governing race institution-
alized as the Raj. Like any other narrative of this kind, his account of
the hool too is there to celebrate a continuity — that of British power
in India. The statement of causes and reforms is no more than a struc-
tural requirement for this continuum, providing it respectively with
context and perspective. These serve admirably to register the event as
a datum in the life-story of the empire, but do nothing to illuminate
that consciousness which is called insurgency. The rebel has no place
in this history as the subject of rebellion.

There is nothing in tertiary discourse to make up for this absence.
Farthest removed in time from the events which it has for its theme,
it always looks at them in the third person. It is the work of non-offi-
cials writers in most cases or of former officials no longer under any
professional obligation or constraint to represent the standpoint of the
government. If it happens to carry an official view at all, this is only
because the author has chosen it of his own will rather than because he
has been conditioned to do so by any loyalty or allegiance based on
administrative involvement. There are indeed some historical works
which actually show such a preference and are unable to speak in a
voice other than that of the custodians of law and order — an instance
of tertiary discourse reverting to that state of crude identification with
the regime so characteristic of primary discourse.

But there are other and very different idioms within this genre rang-
ing from liberal to left. The latter is particularly impoitani as perhaps
the most influential and prolific of all the many varieties of tertiary

223

The Prose of Counter-Insurgency

discourse. We owe to it some of the best studies on Indian peasant in-
surgency and more and more of these are coming out all the time as
evidence both of a growing academic interest in the subject and the
relevance that the subaltern movements of the past have to contemporary
tensions in our part of the world. This literature is distinguished by its
effort to break away from the code of counter-insurgency. It adopts
the insurgents point of view and regards with him as ‘fine* what the
other side calls ‘terrible’, and vice versa. It leaves the reader in no doubt
that it wants the rebels and not their enemies to win. Here, unlike in
secondary discourse of the liberal-imperialist type, recognition of the
wrongs done to the peasants leads directly to support for their struggle
to seek redress by arms.

Yet these two types, so very different from and contrary to each
other in ideological orientation, have much else that is common be-
tween them. Take for instance that remarkable contribution of radical
scholarship, Suprakash Rays Bharater Krishak-Bidroha O Ganatantrik
Samgram2G and compare its account of the Santal uprising of 1855
with Hunters. The texts echo each other as narratives. Ray’s being the
later work has all the advantage of drawing on more recent research
such as Dattas, and thus being more informed. But much of what it
has to say about the inauguration and development of the hool is
taken — in fact, quoted directly — from Hunter’s Annals 21 And both
the authors rely on the Calcutta Review ( 1856) article for much of their
evidence. There is thus little in the description of this particular event
which differs significantly between the secondary and the tertiary
types of discourse.

Nor is there much to distinguish between the two in terms of their
admiration for the courage of the rebels and their abhorrence of the
genocidal operations mounted by the counter-insurgency forces. In
fact, on both these points Ray reproduces in extenso Hunter s testimony,
gathered first-hand from officers directly involved in the campaign,
that the Santals ‘did not understand yielding*, while for the army ‘it
was not war ... it was execution.’28 The sympathy expressed for the

26 Vol. I (Calcutta: 1966), chapter 13.

27 For these, see ibid., pp. 323, 325, 327, 328.

28 Ibid., p. 337; Hunter, op. cit., pp. 247-9.

224

The Small Voice of History

enemies of the Raj in the radical tertiary discourse is matched hilly by
that in the colonialist secondary discourse. Indeed, for both, the hool
was an eminently just struggle — an evaluation derived from their
mutual concurrence about the factors which had provoked it. Wicked
landlords, extortionate usurers, dishonest traders, venal police, irres-
ponsible officials, and partisan processes of law — all figure with equal
prominence in both the accounts. Both the historians draw on the
evidence recorded on this subject in the Calcutta Review essay, and for
much of his information about Santal indebtedness and bond slavery,
about moneylenders’ and landlords’ oppression and administrative
connivance at all this, Ray relies heavily again on Hunter, as witness the
extracts quoted liberally from the latter’s work.29

However, causality is used by the two writers to develop entirely
different perspectives. The statement of causes has the same part to
play in Hunters account as in any other narratives of the secondary
type — that is, as an essential aspect of the discourse of counter-insur-
gency. In this respect his Annals belongs to a tradition of colonialist
historiography which, for this particular event, is typically exemplified
by that racist and vindicative essay, ‘The Sonthal Rebellion’. There the
obviously knowledgeable but tough-minded official ascribes the up-
rising, as Hunter does, to banias’ fraud, mahajani transaction, zamindari
despotism, and sarkari inefficiency. In much the same vein Thornhill’s
Personal Adventures accounts for the rural uprisings of the period of
the Mutiny in Uttar Pradesh quite clearly by the breakdown in tradi-
tional agrarian relations consequent on the advent of British rule.
O’Malley identifies the root of the Pabna bidroha of 1873 in rack-
renting by landlords, and the Deccan Riots Commission that of the
disturbances of 1875 in the exploitation of the Kunbi peasantry by
alien moneylenders in Poona and Ahmednagar districts.30 One could
go on adding many other events and texts to this list. The spirit of all

29 Ray, op. cit., pp. 316-19.

30 Anon., op. cit., pp. 238—4 1 ; Thornhill, op. ct., pp. 33-5; L.S.S. O'Malley,
Bengal Gazetteers: Pabna (Calcutta: 1923), p. 25; Report of the Commission
Appointed in India to Inquire into the Causes of the Riots which took place in the
year 1875 in the Poona and Ahmednagar Districts of the .Bombay Presidency
(London: \ 87 8), passim.

The Prose of Counter-Insurgency 225

these is well represented in the following extract from the Judicial
Department Resolutions of 22 November 1831 on the subject of the
insurrection led by Titu Mir: The serious nature of the late disturbances
in the district of Baraset renders it an object of paramount importance
that the cause which gave rise to them should be fully investigated
in order that the motives which activated the insurgents may be rightly
understood and such measures adopted as may be deemed expedient
to prevent a recurrence of similar disorders.'*1 That sums it up. To know
the cause of a phenomenon is already a step taken in the direction of
controlling it. To investigate and thereby understand the cause of
rural disturbances is an aid to measures ‘deemed expedient to prevent
a recurrence of similar disorders' To that end the correspondent of the
Calcutta Review (1856) recommended ‘that condign retribution,
namely, ‘that they [the Santals] should be surrounded and hunted up
everywhere . . . that they should be compelled, by force, if need be, to
return to the Damin-i-koh, and to the wasted country in Bhaugulpore
and Beerbhoom, to rebuild the ruined villages, restore the desolate
fields to cultivation, open roads, and advance general public works;
and do this under watch and guard . . . and that this state of things
should be continued, until they are completely tranquillized, and
reconciled to their allegiance.’32 The gentler alternative put forward
by Hunter was, as we have seen, a combination of martial law to sup-
press an ongoing revolt and measures to follow it up by ‘English
enterprise’ in order (as his compatriot had suggested) to absorb the
unruly peasantry as a cheap labour force in agriculture and public
works for the benefit respectively of the same dikus and railway and
roadwork engineers against whom they had taken up arms. With all
their variation in tone, however, both the prescriptions to make . . .
rebellion impossible by the elevation of the Sonthals’33 — indeed, all
colonialist solutions arrived at by the causal explanation of our peasant
uprisings — were grist to a historiography committed to assimilating
them to the transcendental destiny of the British empire.

31 BC 54222: /C, 22 November 1831 (no. 91). Emphasis added.

32 Anon., op. cit., pp. 263-4.

33 Ibid., p. 263.

226 The Small Voice of History

XII

Causality serves to hitch the hool to a rather different kind of dest-
iny in Rays account. But the latter goes through the same steps as
Hunters — that is, context-event-perspective ranged along a historical
continuum — to arrive there. There are some obvious parallelisms in
the way the event acquires a context in the two works. Both start off
with prehistory (treated moie briefly by Ray than Hunter) and follow
it up with a survey of the more recent past since 1790 when the tribe
first came into contact with the regime. It is there that the cause of the
insurrection lies for both — but with a difference. For Hunter the dis-
turbances originated in a local malignance in an otherwise healthy
body — the failure of a district administration to act up to the then
emerging ideal of the Raj as the ma-baap of the peasantry and protect
them from the tyranny of wicked elements within the native society
itself. For Ray it was the very presence of British power in India which
had goaded the Santals to revolt, for their enemies the landlords and
moneylenders owed their authority and indeed their existence to the
new arrangements in landed property introduced by the colonial
government and the accelerated development of a money economy
under its impact. The rising constituted, therefore, a critique not only
of a local administration but of colonialism itself. Indeed he uses
Hunters own evidence to arrive at that very different, indeed contrary,
conclusion: 4It is clearly proved by Hunters own statement that the
responsibility for the extreme uiiseiy of the Santals lies with the Eng-
lish administrative system taken as a whole together with thezamindars
and mahajans. For it was the English administrative system which had
created zamindars and mahajans in order to satisfy its own need for
exploitation and government, and helped them directly and indirectly
by offering its protection and patronage.’34 With colonialism, that is,
the Raj as a system and in its entirety (rather than any of its local
malfunctions) identified thus as the prime cause of rebellion, its out-
come acquires radically different values in the two texts. While Hunter
is explicit in his preference of a victory in favour of the regime, Ray is
equally so in favour of the rebels. And corresponding to this each has

34 Ray, op. cit., p. 318.

227

The Prose of Counter-Insurgency

a perspective which stands out in sharp contrast to that of the other.
It is for Hunter the consolidation of British rule based on a reformed
administration which no longer incites jacqueries by its failure to
protect adivasis from native exploiters, but transforms them into an
abundant and mobile labour force readily and profitably employed by
Indian landlords and ‘English enterprise’. For Ray the event is the pre-
cursor of the great rebellion of 1 857 and a vital link in a protracted
struggle of the Indian people in general and peasants and workers in
particular against foreign as well as indigenous oppressors. The armed
insurrection of the Santals, he says, has indicated a way to the Indian
people. ‘That particular way has, thanks to the great rebellion of 1 857,
developed into the broad highway of India’s struggle for freedom.That
highway extends into the twentieth century. The Indian peasantry are
on their march along that very highway.’35 In fitting the hool thus to
a perspective of continuing struggle of the rural masses the author
draws on a well-established tradition of radical historiography as
witness, for instance, the following extract from a pamphlet which had
a wide readership in left political circles nearly thirty years ago:

The din of the actual battles of the insurrection has died down. But its
echoes have kept on vibrating through the years, growing louder and
louder as more peasants joined in the fight. The clarion call that sum-
moned the Santhals to battle . . . was to be heard in other p^rts of the
country at the time of the Indigo Strike of 1 860, the Pabna and Bogra
Uprising of 1 872, the Maratha Peasant Rising in Poona and Ahmednagar
in 1875-6. It was finally to merge in the massive demand of the peas-
antry all over the country for an end to zamindari and moneylending
oppression . . . Glory to the immortal Santhals who . . . showed the
path to battle! The banner of militant struggle has since then passed
from hand to hand over the length and breadth of India.36

The power of such assimilative thinking about the history of peasant
insurgency is further illustrated by the concluding words of an essay
written by a veteran of the peasant movement and published by the

35 Ibid., p. 340.

36 L. Natarajan, Peasant Uprisings in India , 1850-1900 (Bombav: 1953),

pp. 31-2.

228 The Small Voice of History

Pashchimbanga Pradeshik Krishak Sabha on the eve of the centenary
of the San tal revolt. Thus, ‘The flames of the fire kindled by the peasant
martyrs of the Santal insurrection a hundred years ago had spread to
many regions all over India. Those flames could be seen burning in the
indigo cultivators’ rebellion in Bengal (1860), in the uprising of the
raiyats of Pabna and Bogra (1872), in that of the Maratha peasantry
of the Deccan (1875-6). The same fire was kindled again and again in
the course of the Moplah peasant revolts of Malabar. That fire has not
been extinguished yet, it is still burning in the hearts of the Indian
peasants . . ,’37 The purpose of such tertiary discourse is quite clearly
to try and retrieve the history of insurgency from that continuum
which is designed to assimilate every jacquerie to ‘England’s Work in
India and arrange it along the alternative axis of a protracted campaign
for freedom and socialism. However, as with colonialist historiography
this, too, amounts to an act of appropriation which excludes the rebel
as the conscious subject of his own history and incorporates the lat-
ter as only a contingent element in another history with another sub-
ject. Just as it is not the rebel but the Raj which is the real subject of
secondary discourse and the Indian bourgeoisie that of tertiary discourse
of the History-of-the-Freedom-Struggle genre, so is an abstraction
called Worker-and-Peasant, an ideal rather than the real historical
personality of the insurgent , made to replace him in the type of literature
discussed above.

To say this is of course not to deny the political importance of such
appropriation. Since every struggle for power by the historically ascen-
dant classes in any epoch involves a bid to acquire a tradition, it is
entirely in the fitness of things that the revolutionary movements in
India should lay a claim to, among others, the Santal rebellion of 1 855
as a part of their heritage. But however noble the cause and instrument
of such appropriation, it leads to the mediation of the insurgent’s
consciousness by the historians — that is, of a past consciousness by
one conditioned by the present. The distortion which follows necessarily
and inevitably from this process is a function of that hiatus between
event-time and discourse-time which makes the verbal representa-
tion of the past less than accurate in the best of cases. And since the

37 Abdulla Rasul, Saontal Bidroher Amar Kahini (Calcutta: 1954), p. 24.

The Prose of Counter-Insurgency 229

discourse is, in this particular instance, one about properties of the
mind — about attitudes, beliefs, ideas, etc. rather than about externalities
which are easier to identify and describe, the task of representation is
made even more complicated than usual.

There is nothing that historiography can do to eliminate such dis-
tortion altogether, for the latter is built into its optics. What it can do,
however, is to acknowledge such distortion as parametric — as a datum
which determines the form of the exercise itself, and to stop pretending
that it can fully grasp a past consciousness and reconstitute it. Then
and only then might the distance between the latter and the historian s
perception of it be reduced significantly enough to amount to a close
approximation, which is the best one could hope for. The gap as it
stands at the moment is indeed so wide that there is much more than
an irreducible degree of error in the existing literature on this point.
Even a brief look at some of the discourses on the 1855 insurrection
should bear this out.

XIII

Religiosity was, by all accounts, central to the hool. The notion of
power which inspired it was made up of such ideas and expressed in
such words and acts as were explicitly religious in character. It was not
that power was a content wrapped up in a form external to it called
religion. It was a matter of both being inseparably collapsed as the
signified and its signifier ( vdgarthaviva samprktau ) in the language of
that massive violence. Hence the attribution of the rising to a divine
command rather than to any particular grievance; the enactment of
rituals both before (e.g. propitiatory ceremonies to ward off the
apocalypse of the Primeval Serpents — Lag and Lagini, the distribution
of tel-sindury etc.) and during the uprising (e.g. worshipping the
goddess Durga, bathing in the Ganges, etc.); the generation and
circulation of myth in its characteristic vehicle — rumour (e.g. about
the advent of ‘the exterminating angel1 incarnated as a buffalo, the
birth of a prodigious hero to a virgin, etc.).38 The evidence is both

38 The instance are far too numerous to cite in an essay of this size, but for
some samples, see Mare Hapram Ko Reak Kathay chapter 79, in A. Mitra (ed.),
District Handbooks: Bankura (Calcutta: 1953).

230

The Small Voice of History

unequivocal and ample on this point. The statements we have from the
leading protagonists and their followers are all emphatic and indeed
insistent on this aspect of their struggle, as should be obvious even
from the few extracts of source material reproduced below (in the
appendix). In sum, it is not possible to speak of insurgency in this case
except as a religious consciousness — except, that is, as a massive de-
monstration of self-estrangement (to borrow Marxs term for the very
essence of religiosity) which made the rebels look upon their project
as predicated on a will other than their own: ‘Kanoo and Seedoo
Manjee are not fighting. The Thacoor himself will fight.’39

How authentically has this been represented in historical discourse?
It was identified in official correspondence at the time as a case of
‘fanaticism’. The insurrection was three months old and still going
strong when J.R. Ward, a Special Commissioner and one of the most
important administrators in the Birbhum region, wrote in some des-
peration to his superiors in Calcutta, ‘I have been unable to trace
the insurrection in Beerbhoom to any thing but fanaticism .’ The
idiom he used to describe the phenomenon was typical of the shocked
and culturally arrogant response of nineteenth -century colonialism to
any radical movement inspired by a non-Christian doctrine among a
subject population: ‘These Sonthals have been led to join in the re
bellion under a persuasion which is clearly traceable to their brethren
in Bhaugulpore, that an Almighty &C inspired Being appeared as
the redeemer of their Caste & their ignorance & superstition was easily
worked into a religious frenzy which has stopped at nothing.’40 That
idiom occurs also in the Calcutta Review article. There the Santal is
acknowledged as ‘an eminently religious man’ and his revolt as a paral-
lel of other historical occasions when ‘ the fanatical spirit of religious
superstition had been ‘swayed to strengthen and help forward a quarrel
already ready to burst and based on other grounds.’41 However, the
author gives this identification a significantly different slant from
that in the report quoted above. There an incomprehending Ward.

39 Appendix: Extract 2.

40 /P, 8 November 18*>5: Waid to Government of Bengal, 130ctober 1855.
Emphasis added.

41 Anon., op. cit., p. 243. Emphasis added.

231

The Prose of Counter-Insurgency

caught in the blast of the hool, appears to have been impressed by the
spontaneity of a religious frenzy which . . . stopped at nothing/ By
contrast the article written after the regime had recovered its self-
confidence — thanks to the search-and-burn campaign in the disturbed
tracts — interprets religiosity as a propagandist ruse used by the leaders
to sustain the morale of the rebels. Referring, for instance, to the
messianic rumours in circulation it says, ‘All these absurdities were no
doubt devised to keep up the courage of the numerous rabble/42
Nothing could be more elitist. The insurgents are regarded here as a
mindless ‘rabble devoid of a will of their own and easily manipulated
by their chiefs.

But elitism such as this is not a feature of colonialist historiography
alone. Tertiary discourse of the radical variety, too, exhibits the same
disdain for the political consciousness of the peasant masses when
it is mediated by religiosity. For a sample let us turn to Rays account
of the rising again. He quotes the following lines from the Calcutta
Review article in a somewhat inaccurate but still clearly recognizable
translation:

Seedoo and Kanoo were at night seated in their home, resolving many
things ... a bit of paper fell on Seedoo s head, and suddenly the Tha-
koor [god] appeared before the astonished gaze of Seedoo and Kanoo;
he was like a white man though dressed in the native style; on each
hand he had ten fingers; he held a white book, and wrote therein; the
book and with it 20 pieces of paper ... he presented to the brothers;
ascended upwards, and disappeared. Another bit of paper fell on
Seedoo s head, and then came two men . . . hinted to them the pur-
port ofThakoor s order, and they likewise vanished. But there was not
merely one apparition of the sublime Thakoor; each day in the week
for some short period, did he make known his presence to his favourite
apostles. . . In the silvery pages of the book, and upon the white leaves
of the single scraps of paper, were words written; these were afterwards
deciphered by literate Sonthals, able to read and interpret; but their
meaning had already been sufficiendy indicated to the two leaders.43

42 Ibid., p. 246. Emphasis added.

43 Ibid., pp. 243—4. Ray, op. cit., pp. 321-2.

232

The Small Voice of History

With some minor changes of detail (inevitable in a living folklore)
this is indeed a fairly authentic account of the visions the two Santal
leaders believed they had had. Their statements, reproduced in part in
the appendix (extracts 3 and 4), bear this out. These, incidentally, were
not public pronouncements meant to impress their followers. Unlike
‘The Thacoors Perwannah’ (appendix: extract 2) intended to make
their views known to the authorities before the uprising, these were the
words of captives facing execution. Addressed to hostile interrogators
in military encampments, they could have little use as propaganda.
Uttered by men of a tribe which, according to all accounts, had not yet
learnt to lie,44 these represented the truth and nothing but the truth
for their speakers. But that is not what Ray would credit them with.
What figures as a mere insinuation in the Calcutta Review is raised
to the status of an elaborate propaganda device in his introductory
remarks on the passage cited above. Thus: ‘Both Sidu and Kanu knew
that the slogan (< dhwani ) which would have the most effect among
the backward Santals, was one that was religious. Therefore, in order
to inspire the Santals to struggle they spread the word about God’s
directive in favour of launching such a struggle. The story invented
( kalpita ) by them is as follows.*45 There is little that is different here
from what the colonialist writer had to say about the presumed back-
wardness of the Santal peasantry, the manipulative designs of their
leaders, and the uses of religion as the means of such manipulation.
Indeed, on each of these points Ray does better and is by far the more
explicit of the two authors in attributing a gross lie and downright
deception to the rebel chiefs without any evidence at all. The inven-
tion is all his own and testifies to the failure of a shallow radicalism to
conceptualize insurgent mentality except in terms of an unadulterat-
ed secularism. Unable to grasp religiosity as the central modality of
peasant consciousness in colonial India, he is shy to acknowledge its
mediation of the peasant’s idea of power and all the resultant contra-
dictions. He is obliged therefore to rationalize the ambiguities of rebel

44 This is generally accepted. See, for instance, Shenvills observation about
the truth being sacred’ to the Santals, offering in this respect a bright example
to their living neighbours, the Bengalis.’ Geographical and Statistical Report of
the District Bhaugulpoor (Calcutta: 1854), p. 32.

45 Ray, op. cit., p. 321. Emphasis added.

233

The Prose of Counter-Insurgency

politics by assigning a worldly consciousness to the leaders and an
otherworldly one to their followers, making of the latter innocent
dupes of crafty men armed with all the tricks of a modern Indian poli-
tician out to solicit rural votes. Where this lands the historian can
be seen even more clearly in the projection of this thesis to a study of
the Rirsaite ulgulan in Rays subsequent work. He writes:

In order to propagate this religious doctrine of his Birsa adopted a
new device ( kaushai ) — just as Sidu, the Santa! leader, had done on the
eve of the Santal rebellion of J 885. Birsa knew that the Kol were a very
backward people and were full of religious superstition as a result of
Hindu-Brahmanical and Christian missionary propaganda amongst
them over a long period. Therefore, it would not do to avoid the ques-
tion of religion if the Kol people were to be liberated from those wicked
religious influences and drawn into the path of rebellion. Rather, in
order to overcome the evil influences of Hindu and Christian religions,
it would be necessary to spread his new religious faith among them in
the name of that very God of theirs, and to introduce new rules. To this
end, recourse had to be had to falsehood \ if necessary, tn the interests of
the people.

Birsa spread the word that he had received this new religion of his
from the chief deity of the Mundas, Sing Bonga, himself.46

Thus the radical historian is driven by the logic of his own incompre-
hension to attribute a deliberate falsehood to one of the greatest of
our rebels. The ideology of that mighty ulgulan is nothing but pure
fabrication for him. And he is not alone in his misreading of insurgent
consciousness. Baskay echoes him almost word for word in describing
the Santal ieaders claim to divine support for the hool as propaganda
meant ‘to inspire the Santals to rise in revolt’.47 Formulations such as
these have their foil in other writings of the same genre which solve the
riddle of religious thinking among the Santal rebels by ignoring it
altogether. A reader who has Natarajan’s and Rasuls once influential

46 Ray, Bharater Baiplabik Samgramer Itihas, vol. I (Calcutta: 1970), p. 95.
Emphasis added. The sentence italicized by us in the quoted passage reads as
follows in the Bengali original: ‘ Eijanyo prayojane jatir svarthey mithyar asroy
grahan karitey hoibey .*

47 Dhirendranath Baskay, Saontal Ganasamgramer Itihas (Calcutta: 1976),

p. 66.

234 The Small Voice of History

essays as his only source of information about the insurrection of 1 855
would hardly suspect any religiosity at all in that great event. It is re-
presented there exclusively in its secular aspects. This attitude is of
course not confined to the authors discussed in this essay. The same
mixture, of myopia and downright refusal to look at the evidence that
is there, characterizes a great deal more of the existing literature on
the subject.

XIV

Why is tertiary discourse, even of the radical variety, so reluctant to
come to terms with the religious element in rebel consciousness?
Because it is still trapped in the paradigm which inspired the ideologically
contrary, because colonialist, discourse of the primary and second-
ary types. It follows, in each case, from a refusal to acknowledge the
insurgent as the subject of his own history. For once a peasant rebellion
has been assimilated to the career of the Raj, the Nation, or the People,
it becomes easy for the historian to abdicate the responsibility he has
of exploring and describing the consciousness specific to that rebel-
lion and be content to ascribe to it a transcendental consciousness.
In operative terms, this means denying a will to the mass of the rebels
themselves and representing them merely as instruments of some other
will. It is thus that in colonialist historiography insurgency is seen as
the articulation of a pure spontaneity pitted against the will of the State
as embodied in the Raj. If any consciousness is attributed ar all to
the rebels, it is only a few of their leaders — more often than not some
individual members or small groups of the gentry — who are credited
with it. Again, in bourgeois-nationalist historiography it is an elite
consciousness which is read into all peasant movements as their motive
force. This had led to such grotesqueness as the characterization of the
Indigo Rebellion of 1 860 as ‘the first non-violent mass movement’,48
and generally of all the popular struggles in rural India during the first
125 years of British rule as the spiritual harbinger of the Indian
National Congress.

48 Jogesh Chandra Bagal (ed.), Peasant Revolution in Bengal (Calcutta:
1953), p. 5.

The Prose of Counter-Insurgency 235

In much the same way the specificity of rebel consciousness had
eluded radical historiography as well. This has been so because it is
impaled on a concept of peasant revolts as a succession of events ranged
along a direct line of descent — as a heritage, as it is often called — in
which all the constituents have the same pedigree and replicate each
other in their commitment to the highest ideals of liberty, equality,
and fraternity. In this ahistorical view of the history of insurgency all
moments of consciousness are assimilated to the ultimate and highest
moment of the series — indeed to an Ideal Consciousness. A historiogra-
phy devoted to its pursuit (even when that is done, regrettably, in the
name of Marxism) is ill-equipped to cope with contradictions which
are indeed the stuff history is made of. Since the Ideal is supposed to
be one hundred per cent secular in character, the devotee tends to look
away when confronted with the evidence of religiosity, as if the latter
did not exist, or explain it away as a clever but well-intentioned fraud
perpetrated by enlightened leaders on their moronic followers — all
done, of course, ‘in the interests of the people’! Hence, the rich material
of myths, rituals, rumours, hopes for a Golden Age, and fears of an imr
minent End of the World, all of which speaks of the self-alienation of
the rebel, is wasted on this abstract and sterile discourse. It can do little
to illuminate that combination of sectarianism and militancy which
is so important a feature of our rural history. The ambiguity of such
phenomena — witnessed during theTebhaga movement in Dinajpur,
as Muslim peasants coming to the Kisan Sabha sometimes inscribing
a hammer or a sickle on the Muslim League flag’, and young maulavis
‘reciting melodious verse from the Koran’ at village meetings as ‘they
condemned the jotedari system and the practice of charging high inte-
rest rates’49 — will be beyond its grasp. The swift transformation of
class struggle into communal strife and vice versa in our countryside
evokes from it either some well-contrived apology or a simple gesture
of embarrassment, but no real explanation.

However, it is not only the religious element in rebel consciousness
which this historiography fails to comprehend. The specificity of a
rural insurrection is expressed in terms of many other contradictions
as well. These too are missed out. Blinded by the glare of a perfect and

49 Sunil Sen, Agrarian Struggle in Bengal, 1946-47 (New Delhi: 1972), p. 49.

236

The Small Voice of History

immaculate consciousness, the historian sees nothing, for instance,
but solidarity in rebel behaviour and fails to notice its Other, namely,
betrayal. Committed inflexibly to the notion of insurgency as a
generalized movement, he underestimates the power of the brakes
put on it by localism and territoriality. Convinced that mobilization
for a rural uprising flows exclusively from an overall elite authority,
he tends to disregard the opeiation of many other authorities within
the primordial relations of a rural community. A prisoner of empty
abstractions, tertiary discourse, even of the radical kind, has thus dis-
tanced itself from the prose of counter-insurgency only by a declara-
tion of sentiment so far. It has still to go a long way before it can prove
that the insurgent can rely on its performance to recover his place
in history.

Appendix

Extract 1

I came to plunder . . . Sidoo and Kaloo [Kanhul declared themselves
Rajas & [said] they would plunder the whole country and take pos-
session of it — they said also, no one can stop us for it is the order of
Takoor. On this account we have all come with them. — Source: JPy
19 July 1855: Balai Majhis Statement, 14 July 1855.

Extract 2

The Thacoor has descended in the house o t Seedoo Manjee, Kanoo
Manjee, Bhyrub and Chand, at Bhugnudihee in Pergunnah Kunjeala.
The Thakoor in person is conversing with them, he has descended
from Heaven, he is conversing with Kanoor and Seedoo, The Sahibs
and the white Soldiers will fight. Kanoo and Seedoo Manjee are not
fighting. The Thacoor himself will fight. Therefore you Sahibs and
Soldiers fight with the Thacoor himself Mother Ganges will come to
the Thacoor s [assistance] . Fire will rain from Heaven. If you are satis-
fied with theThacoor then you must go to the other side of the Ganges.
The Thacoor has ordered the Sonthals that for a buliuck plough 1 anna
is to be paid for revenue. Buffalo plough 2 annas The reign of Truth
has begun True justice will be administered. He who does not speak the
truth will not be allowed to remain on the Earth. The Mahajuns have

The Prose of Counter-Insurgency 237

committed a great sin. The Sahibs and the amlah have made everything
bad, in this the Sahibs have sinned greatly.

Those who tell things to the Magistrate and those who investigate
cases for him, take 70 or 80 Rs. with great oppression in this the Sahibs
have sinned. On this account theThacoor has ordered me saying that
the country is not the Sahibs . . .

P.S. If you Sahibs agree, then you must remain on the other side of
the Ganges, and if you dont agree you cant remain on that side of the
river, 1 will rain fire and all the Sahibs will be killed by the hand of God
in person and Sahibs if you fight with muskets the Sonthal will not be
hit by the bullets and theThacoor will give your Elephants and horses
of his own accord to the Son thals ... if you fight with the Sonthals two
days will be as one day and two nights as one night. This is the order
of the Thacoor. — Source: JP \ 4 October 1855: ‘The Thacoors
Perwannah’, dated 10 Saon 1262.

Extract 3

Then the Manjees & Purgunnaits assembled in my Verandah, & we
consulted for 2 months, that Pontet & Mohesh Dutt dont listen to
our complaints & no one acts as our Father & Mother then a God
descended from heaven in the form of a cartwheel & said to me ‘Kill
Pontet & the Darogah & the Mahajuns & then you will have justice
& a Father & Mother; then the Thacoor went back to the heavens;
after this 2 men like Bengallees came into my Verhandah: they each
had six fingers half a piece of paper fell on my head before the Thacoor
came & half fell afterwards. 1 could not read but Chand & Seheree &
a Dhome read it, they said ‘The Thacoor has written to you to fight
theMahajens& then you will have justice’ . . . — Source: JPy 8 November
1855, ‘Examination of Sedoo Sonthal late Thacoor*.

Extract 4

In Bysack the God descended in my house I sent a perwannah to the
Burra Sahib at Calcutta ... I wrote that the Thacoor had come to my
house & was conversing with me & had told all the Sonthals that they
were to be under the charge of me & that I was to pay all the revenue
to Government & was to oppress no one & the zamindars & Mahajans

238

The Small Voice of History

were committing great oppression taking 20 pice for one & that I was
to place them at a distance from the sonthals & if they do not go away
to fight with them.

Ishwar was a white man with only a dootee & chudder he sat on the
ground like a Sahib he wrote on this bit of paper. He gave me 4 papers
but afterwards presented 1 6 more. The thacoor had 5 fingers on each
hand. I did not see him in the day I saw him only in the night. The
sonthals then assembled at my house to see the thacoor.

[At Maheshpur] the troops came & we had a fight . . . afterwards see-
ing that men on our side were falling we both turned twice on them
& once drove them away, then I made poojah . . . & then a great many
balls came & Seedoo & 1 were both wounded. The thacoor had said
water will come out of the muskets but my troops committed some
crime therefore the thacoors prediction fs] were not fulfilled about
80 sonthals were killed.

Ail the blank papers fell from heaven & the book in which all the pages
arc blank also fell from heaven. — Source: JP, 20 December 1855,
‘Examination of Kanoo SonthaT.

The Career of an Anti-God in
Heaven and on Earth

Religion is the oldest of archives in our subcontinent. All the
principal moments of the ancient relationship of dominance
„ and subordination are recorded in it as codes of authority,
collaboration, and resistance. These codes have their origin in historically
articulated structures of power. Congealed and generalized through
recursive use over long periods, they tend to outlive their original
functions and operate in subsequent cultures not only as a relic but
also as an actively overdetermining factor. The result is a cumulative
documentation of subaltern and elite attitudes to power as expressed
by cult, ritual, and custom and their permutations in the belief sys-
tems. This documentation is not easy to read precisely, because of
the form in which it comes. Existing for the most part as a body of oral
tradition, it lacks the transparency of written discourse; shrouded
often in mystic sentiments and obscure symbols, its reason defies the
rationalistic assumptions of its interpreters; modified by accretion and
decay, it does not allow itself to be grasped as lucidly as a consistent
body of law; elliptical and syncopated, it suffers in comprehensibility
because of the duplex character of its messages which are worldly and
otherworldly at the same time.

More than any other historian it is D.D. Kosambi to whom we owe
our awareness of the existence of this documentation and its importance.
In both of his great historical surveys he has demonstrated how the

Copyright © 1985 Ranajit Guha. First published in Ashok Mitra, ed..
The Truth Unites: Essays in Tribute to Samar Sen (Calcutta: Subarnarekha,
1985), pp. 1-25.

240 The Small Voice of History

continuities of our material and intellectual cultures are made up of
imbricated survivals from an old tribal past and elements of relatively
later social developments.1 At the level of the superstructure this
pattern is most obviously discernible in the religions of the castes
which cluster at the very bottom of the Hindu hierarchy and owe their
lower social and economic status to their present or former refusal to
take to food production and plough agriculture.’ These lowest castes,
many of them classified as criminal tribes’ by the colonial regime,
often preserve tribal rites, usages and myths.’2 These latter do not,
however, exist in an altogether frozen state. The pull of parallel tradi-
tions’ and the pressure of upper-caste, especially Brahmanical, culture
tend to assimilate and thereby transform them to such an extent that
they show up as little more than archaic traces within an established
Hindu idiom. For ‘the main work of Brahminism has been to gather
the myths together, to display them as unified cycles of stories and to
set them in a better-developed social framework.’3 However, once
the syncretic wrapping is taken off, the content of many a myth can
be identified as what it really is — that is, as a figure of some ancient and
unresolved antagonism.

The myth of Rahu can be read as the record of such an antagonism. 4
It is given in its first elaborate version in the Mahabharata as an episode
in the account o! the Churning ot the Ocean.

1 D.D. Kosambi, An Introduction to the Study of Indian History, rev. 2nd edn
(Bombay: 1975), and The Culture and Civilisation of Ancient India in Historical
Outline (reprint, Delhi: 1972), ch. 1 et passim.

2 Kosambi, Culture and Civilisation , p. 1 5.

3 Ibid., p. 16.

4 ‘Rahu’ is written without a diacritical mark. The use of the latter, for pur-
poses of transcription, has been restricted, throughout the essay, to words
within quoted excerpts, and apart from them, to such occasions as require it
indispensably in order to clarify a meaning. The version given in Myth I comes
from The Mahabharata: I. The Book of the Beginning \ tr and ed. J.A.B. van
Buitenen (Chicago: 1973), pp. 74-5. This legend, says Georges Dumdzil, is
already known to the Vedas, but with the demon named as Svarbhanu. It
is not associated there with amrta, which, he suggests, may be evidence of

The Career of an Anti-God

241

Myth 1

. . . from the churning ocean . . . came forth the beautiful God Dhan-
vantari who carried a white gourd that held the Elixir.

When they saw this great marvel, a ioud outcry for the Elixir went
up from the Danavas, who screeched ‘It is mine!’ But Lord Narayana
employed his bewitching wizardry and assumed the wondrous shape
of a woman; then he joined the Danavas. Their minds bewitched, they
gave that woman the Elixir, both Danavas and Daityas did, for their
hearts went out to her.

Now the Daityas and Danavas massed together . . . and rushed
upon the Gods. The mighty God Visnu held fast to the Elixir; and the
Lord, seconded by Nara, took it away from the princes of the Danavas.
And all the hosts of the Gods received the Elixir from Visnu s hands,
and amidst a tumultuous confusion, drank of it.

While the Gods were drinking the yearned-for Elixir, a Danava by
the name of Rahu took the guise of a God and began to drink it too.
The Elixir had gone down as far as the Danava s throat when the Sun
and the Moon gave alarm. . . . The blessed Lord who wields the dis-
cus thereupon cut off his diademed head as he started to drink. The
Danavas gigantic head fell rolling on the ground and roared most
frighteningly. Ever since there has been a lasting feud between Rah us
head and the Sun and the Moon; and even today he swallows them
both.

The symbolism of this heavenly violence leaves no room for doubt
about its morality. The dialectic of creation required an interplay
between opposite principles — between the elixir of eternal life ( amrta )
and poison (kdlakuta) , between gods and anti-gods.5 In the contest for
ambrosia between the latter, the supreme god Visnu had to throw his
weight on the side of the devas and use a mean, sexist trick in order to
deprive the other side of their share. When, however, a danava was
bold enough to sneak his way into the celestial banquet, he had to be
punished for the dual crime of misappropriating the food of the gods

its having been une innovation hindoue. G. Dumdzil, Le Festin dlmmortalitf
(Paris: 1924), p. 20.

5 For a perceptive comment on this dialectic, see W.D. O’Flaherty. Hindu
Myths (Harmondsworth: 1975), pp. 273—4.

242

The Small Voice of History

and defiling their ceremonial meal. The festin d'immortaliti (to use
Dumdzils graphic expression) turned thus into an occasion for the
most positive act of slaughter, that is, by decapitation in a manner con-
forming to the highest Brahmanical standards of danda.

This symbolism agrees well with the idea of disjunction and dis-
tortion underlying the myths and rituals connected with the eclipse in
many cultures. An eclipse ‘ieprcscnts the disruption of an order
governing ‘the alternation of the sun and the moon, day and night,
light and darkness, heat and cold/6 Such a break in that natural se-
quence, says Ldvi-Strauss, coincides with ‘the intrusion of a foreign
element into this same sequence . . . thus bringing about a distortion.’
He shows how popular beliefs about this cosmological phenomenon
in certain non- Western societies have a close parallel, on the sociological
level , to European attitudes about those kinds of marriages which were
considered irregular enough to provoke a charivari. Misalliance in
marriage was thought to be disruptive of ‘the ideal continuity of the
sequence of matrimonial conjunctions’ in a manner not unlike the way
an eclipse disturbed the order of planetary movements.7

In India, too, anxieties about lapses in social order were associated,
in popular imagination, with what appeared to it as a particularly
sinister lapse in the functioning of nature at an eclipse. The latter, it
was believed, could disturb the cycle of biological reproduction and
interrupt the succession of birth and death by suspending the first of
these terms altogether or by distorting it. Folklore is therefore re-
plete with warnings about the adverse effects it is supposed to have on
childbirth. Pregnant women, and in some regions their husbands as
well, are enjoined not to look at an eclipse or the child is bound to be
born deformed. The embryo is liable to be affected not only by the act
of seeing but by any other activity undertaken at this time. In such cases
the infants body is likely to replicate the nature of that activity — a
hare-lip as evidence of chopping and cutting, markings on the fingers
as that of the strain involved in splitting wood or any other object,

6 C. L^vi-Srrauss, The Raw and the Cooked (London: 1 970), p. 288.

7 Misalliance of this kind could include such abnormalities’ as disparity in
age between spouses, improper behaviour by one or the other of them, the mar-
riage of a pregnant girl, and the refusal to hold a ball to celebrate the wedding:
ibid. p. 288. L^vi -Strauss discusses the homology between eclipse and charivari
at length in Part 5 (1) of this work.

243

The Career of an Anti-God

crooked fingers as testimony to working wich locks, and a variety of
tell-tale birthmarks to either of the parents having applied surma to
the eyelids or a tilak to the forehead.8 All of this conforms to the penal
code of the Dharmashastras where punishment for a pataka is often
addressed to that limb of an offender’s body which has been directly
instrumental in committing the particular offence. But the disadvant-
ages of birth during an eclipse could go far beyond physical deformity
and haunt a man for the rest of his life in many other ways: "if a person
be born under the planet Rahu, his wisdom, riches and children will
be destroyed; he will be exposed to many afflictions and be subject to
his enemies.’9

An eclipse threatens society also by pollution associated with death.
This is explained by stapling together the Hindu notion of ritual pur-
ity and the myth of Rahu thus: when an eclipse cakes place, Rahu, the
huge serpent, is devouring the sun or moon, as the case may be. An
eclipse, being thus the decease of one of these heavenly bodies, people
must of necessity observe pollution for the period during which the
eclipse lasts.’10

According to some variants the pollution is said to be caused not by
the death of the luminaries but by Rahu’s approach,1 1 just as a low-
born person of unclean status would defile a Brahman by the very
shadow cast by his body. Since such pollution is transitive, the entire
world is condemned to a state of impurity for as long as Rahu con-
tinues to hold the planets in its grip. ‘The shadow of a demon is as
defiling as the touch of a scavenger (Bhangi) and pollutes everything
it falls on’, wrote an observer of upper caste traditions in Gujarat at the
beginning of this century, so the sun [and] the moon are themselves
defiled during an eclipse, and not only so, but they pollute all that their
light falls on.’12 Consequently, a householder was required to discard
his entire stock of cooked food and drinking water as contaminated,

8 H.A. Rose, A Glossary of the Tribes and Castes of the Punjab and North-West
Frontier Province, vol. I (Lahore: 1919), pp. 127, 738.

9 G.W. Briggs, The Doms and their Near Relation* (Mysore: 1953), p. 547.

10 E. Thurston, Ethnographic Notes in Southern India (Madras: 1906),
p. 289-

1 1 Briggs, The Doms, p. 547.

12 (Mrs) S. Stevenson, The Rites of the Twice-Born (London: 1920),
pp. 351-2.

244

The Small Voice of History

and make no attempt to replace these by cooking or even engage in
culinary preparations such as husking rice, grinding spices, etc., before
the eclipse was over.13 Indeed, so utterly defiling was this phenome-
non believed to be that it was considered inauspicious for even a death
to occur in a family at this time.14 Manus injunction that a learned
Brahmana shall not recite the Veda — that most sacred and sanctifying
of all texts — when Rahu by an eclipse makes the moon impure’,15
shows how popular belief in this regard derived from an ancient Brah-
manical superstition.

This image of Rahu as a highly malevolent power is backed by the
antidotal functions of the rites prescribed for this occasion. Some of
these are olfactive, such as the South Indian practice, mentioned by
Thurston, of burning an animals hoofs and horns ‘in the hope that the
smell will keep away the evil spirits.’ 16 This is an exorcising device for
dealing with ghosts in many parts of the subcontinent. Even more
widespread is the use of noise, as noticed by a Jesuit in an eighteenth-
century travelogue, ‘to make the pretended monster disgorge the
mighty morsels.’17 Noise-making of this kind is common to many
cultures throughout the world ranging, literally, from Peking to
Peru.18 In our country this could take the form of sounding gongs as
in Assam, or shouting as among the Todas of the Nilgiri Hills, or ac-
tually shooting at the sky as done by the Coorg.19 ‘The function of
noise is to draw attention to an anomaly in the unfolding of a syntag-
matic sequence’, says L^vi-Strauss. ‘Two terms of the sequence are in
a state of disjunction; and, correlatively, one of the terms enters into

13 Ibid., p. 352; Briggs, The Dorns, p. 547.

14 Rose, Glossary , p. 865).

1 5 The Laws ofManu , ed. G. Biihler, Sacred Books of the East Series, vol. xxv
(rpnt, Delhi: 1975) | hereafter Manu\: IV, 1 10. ‘Eclipsesofthesun are of course
included’, says Biihler in a note to this passage.

16 Thurston, Ethnographic Notes , p. 290.

17 Ibid., p. 307.

1 8 For China and Peru, see N.M. Penzer, ‘Note on Rahu and Eclipses’, in The
Ocean of Story, vol. II, tr. C.H. Tawney (rpnt, Delhi: 1 968), p. 8 1 . Ldvi -Strauss
discusses the universality of such noise-making in Raw and Cooked.

19 Penzer, ‘Note on Rahu', pp. 81, 82; M.N. Srinivas, Religion and Society
among the Coorgs of South India (Oxford: 1952), pp. 239-40.

245

The Career of an Anti-God

conjunction with another term, although the latter is outside the se-
quence.’20 What is important for us, in the context of our discussion,
is that this term, which intrudes from outside, appears in popular
imagination as a serpent trying to devour a hare, or in its sanskritiz-
ed version as a monster ( danava ) devouring a celestial being. The latter
is what calls for the ritual use of dub and kusa against defilement at
eclipse.21 Each of these owes its sanctity, as herba benedicta, to the part
it is supposed to have played in the struggle against the demons. Dub
(from the Sanskrit word darbha) has been transubstantiated by sacred
lore into a hair which fell from Visnu s mane when, in his incarnation
as a boar, he fought and destroyed a daitya who was trying to drag the
earth to the bottom of the sea. Again, thanks to a mythopoeic con-
version of a blade of grass into another kind of blade, kusa too has a
number of legends ascribed to it as an instrument of decapitation used
by gods and rishis against some of the more overbearing and aggres-
sive of their enemies.22 It came thus to acquire a function not unlike
Visnu s disc {chakra). The latter foiled a demons attempt to help
himself to ambrosia at the time of the Churning of the Ocean {Myth
7), just as kusa served to punish the Serpents (Nagas) by splitting their
tongues as they began to lap up the same elixir stolen by Garuda under
duress.23 Myth and ritual thus came together to confirm the classic
Hindu image of Rahu as a disruptive force on both the cosmological
and the sociological levels so that his appearance in the sky triggered,
with good reason, Brahmanical fears about the imminent end of
the world.24

Ill

The Brahmans, however, did not have the last say. Rahu, condemned
by them as predatory and polluting, still managed to acquire for

20 L6vi-Straus$, Raw and Cooked , p. 289.

21 Stevenson, The Rites, p. 352; W. Crooke, The Popular Religion and Folklore
of Northern India , vol. I (rpnt, Delhi: 1968), p. 22.

22 See, for instance, Briggs, The Doms , pp. 26, 66.

23 O’ Flaherty, Hindu Myths, p. 222, n. 57.

24 Some of this cataclysmic apprehension is reflected in the Mahabharata
thus: ‘ rahuketu yathdkase uditau jagatah ksaye (Karnaparva, 87: 92).

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The Small Voice of History

himself a large following at the lower end of the Hindu hierarchy.
The evidence we have on this subject in the literature of the colonial
period is ample and unmistakable. It ranges from observations made
by Buchanan-Hamilton at the beginning of the nineteenth cen-
tury to those by administrators and ethnographers during the last fifty
years of the Raj.25 All have testified to the existence of an ancient cult
of the eclipse as a still very active element in the belief systems of several
castes, namely, the Dom, the Dosadh, the Bhangi, and the Mang.

These castes were differentiated in their internal structures and in
their ways of life in many respects. But taken together they constituted
a group — called the Dom Group by Briggs in his authoritative mono-
graph— in so far as they shared a very high degree of economic de-
gradation, social stigma, and ritual impurity as their common lot.
Their condition was described thus by an observer seventy-five years
ago: ‘He [the Dom] is born in an ahr [pulse] field and schooled to theft
from his infancy. He wanders an outcaste from the beginning. He lives
without shelter and without food for the morrow, perpetually moving
from encampment chased by the police and execrated by all the villa-
ges .. . Hinduism has failed to reach him . . . the advance of civiliza-
tion has only thrust him into deeper degradation/26 This agrees, in all
essentials, with what Manu had to say about the Chandalas and the
Svapachas who, according to many scholars,27 were the historic pre-
cursors of the communities mentioned above. Thus: ‘the dwellings of
the Chandalas and Svapachas shall be outside the village . . . their

25 Among the most authoritative sources are Briggs, The Doms; F. Buchanan
[Buchanan-Hamilton], An Account ofthe District of Purnca in 1809-10{P atna:
1928); W. Crooke, Popular Religion; W. Crooke, The Tribes and Castes ofthe
North-Western Provinces and Oudh, vol. II (Calcutta: 1896); E.T. Dalton,
Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal (Calcutta: 1872); G.A. Grierson, Bihar Peasant
Life {2nd rev. edn, Patna: 1 926); Penzer, ‘Note on Rahu; H.H. Risley, The Tribes
and Castes of Bengal, vol. 1 (reprint, Calcutta: 1981); R.V. Russell and H. Lai,
Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces, vol. IV (London: 1916); Thurston,
Ethnographic Notes .

26 M. Kennedy, Notes on Criminal Classes in the Bombay Presidency (Bombay:
1908), cited in Briggs, The Doms, p. 147.

27 Sec, for instance, Briggs, The Doms , ch. 1 et passim. The Doms were often
called Chandals in Risley s days (see Risley, Tribes and Castes, p. 240) and per-
haps this continues until today at least in some eastern regions of the subcontinent.

247

The Career of an Anti-God

wealth (shall be) dogs and donkeys. Their dress (shall be) the garments
of the dead, (they shall) eat their food from broken dishes, black iron
(shall be) their ornaments, and they must always wander from place to
place ... at night they shall not walk about in villages and in towns.’28

Quite clearly, time had not helped to alter the status of the Dorn and
the others of this group as vagrants condemned to move about wari-
ly on the margins of society. £They must always wander about from
place to place’, said the ancient law-giver, and that precisely was what
they continued to do well into the twentieth century. This wanderlust,
which appears as prescriptive in the shasti as but as a sort of second
nature in official writing under the Raj, is no doubt an index of the
change that has occurred in ethnography over 1 500 years — a change
in its character as a sacred knowledge to one that is secular. But that
progress from the theological and archaic to the sociological and mod-
ern relates inversely to the conservative forces of a historical phenomenon
ofvery long standing — that is, the resistance of some of the autochthonic
masses of pre-Aryan tribal origin to assimilation within an agrarian
society and its spiritual conditions dominated by Brahmanism. This
phenomenon has been described thus by Kosambi:

At the lowest end [of the social scale’] we still have purely tribal groups,
many of whom are in a food-gathering stage. The surrounding general
society is now food-producing. So food-gathering for these very low
castes generally turns into begging and stealing. Such nethermost
groups were accurately labelled the ‘criminal tribes* by the British in
India, because they refused as a rule to acknowledge law and order out-
side the tribe.

This stratification of Indian society reflects and explains a great deal
of Indian history. ... It can easily be shown that many castes owe their
lower social and economic status to their present or former refusal to
take to food production and plough agriculture. The lowest castes
often preserve tribal rites, usages and myths.29

It has been authoritatively stated that the communities mentioned
above were, like the Dom and the Mang, of purely tribal origin,30 or

28 Manuy x, 51,52, 54.

29 Kosambi, Culture and Civilisation, p. 14. .

30 Risley, Tribes and Castes , p. 241; Kosambi, Introduction , p. 41.

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The Small Voice of History

constituted on an aboriginal base1 modified, as with the Dosadh and
the Bhangi, by recruitment from non-aboriginal populations.31 In
either case, what they all had in common was a remarkable inaptitude
about work on the land — a legacy, no doubt, of a historic reluctance
to take to food production and plough agriculture\ The result was
that even as late as the 1890s Risley could write of the Dom and the
Dosadh as poor agriculturists, none of whom had risen above the
rank of tenants-at-will, or at most that of occupancy raiyats, and a large
proportion of whom earned their living, like the Mang, as nomadic
cultivators or landless day-labourers.32 As the poorest and weakest
section of the rural population, they were the principal source o fbegar
(forced labour) for landlords and the sarkar , and, condemned to the
most menial duties’, they served traditionally as ‘the helots of the entire
Hindu community'. 33 For the rest they were left with vagrancy and its
concomitants — begging and robbing — as an alternative way of life.
Regarded as marginal in a society that came increasingly to be identi-
fied with agricultural settlements, they were despised as antevasayi -
nah by the other inhabitants and persecuted by the authorities as a
potential threat to law and order even in Manus time. The colonial
regime added to the material insecurity of their life by denying them
access to the forest which had hitherto been their provider, while it
embellished their outcaste status by classifying them as ‘criminal tribes’
fit only to be caged up in detention camps governed by curfews and
penal discipline.34

Poverty and social degradation are matched in the life of these
communities by the utmost degree of ritual pollution. They are des-
cribed as quite literally the embodiment of impurity in the Dharma-
shastras, so much so, indeed, that the sin accruing to a person of the
higher castes from physical contact with them or with their shadows

31 Risley, Tribes and Castes , pp. 252-3; Crooke, Tribes and Castes , pp. 348-
9; Briggs, The Dorns , p. 97.

32 Risley, Tribes and Castes , pp. 250, 257; Briggs, The Dorns, pp. 197, 200.

33 Risley, Tribes and Castes , p. 241, Briggs, The Doms, pp. 174-5.

34 Briggs, The Doms , ch. VI, VII and XX, discusses at length the material
conditions of these groups and the operation of the Criminal Tribes Act with
regard to them.

249

The Career of an Anti-God

or, in some cases, even from the sight of them required absolution
by severe penalties and rigorous purificatory rites. This was no empty
Brahmanical injunction, and social practice conformed to it even as
late as the eighteenth century. For ‘it is recorded that under native rule
the Mahars and Mangs were not allowed within the gates of Poona
between 3 p.m. and 9 a.m., because before nine and after three their
bodies cast too long a shadow.’35 The ‘modernizing influence of colo-
nialism appears to have done little to abolish such prejudice, of which
the following observation put on record in the last decade of the Raj
is a measure: ‘When a Dom is called to witness in a court of justice, the
spectators draw in their skirts to avoid con tact with him. (This practice
extends to Bhangis and others of this general class.)*36

Ironically, however, the objects of such loathing have persuaded
themselves, thanks to the weight of tradition, to internalize the sense
of their own impurity. All of them have myths about some sort of an
original sin to account for their polluted status and that sin assumes
invariably the form of a deviation from Brahmanical norms of purity
on the part of an ancestor. Supach Bhagat, the first Dom, is said to have
turned up rather late at a feast given by Siva and Parvati for all castes
and ate what was left over. Since then his descendants have been con-
demned to eat the leavings of all other castes, so that, according to
Risley, they would readily identify themselves at least in some parts of
the country as belonging to th zjutha-khai (‘eater of leavings’) caste.37
A variant of that story (in which Sita and Rama appear as hosts) is used
by the Bhangis to explain their own fall from grace.38 Both of these
communities have also legends about polluting offences committed by
their forbears in the form of handling of dead animals. The Mang, on
their part, trace their congenital impurity to a curse addressed to the
first-born of their community for castrating the sacred bull which, in

35 Russel] and Lai, Tribes and Castes, p. 1 89. For a story about how the sweep-
ers managed to overcome this stigma with Valmikis help, see Briggs, TheDoms,
pp. 58-9.

36 Briggs, TheDoms , p. 123.

37 Risley, Tribes and Castes^. 241. See also Crooke, Tribes and Castes, p. 319.

38 For this and the rest of the information in this paragraph, see Briggs,
The Doms , pp. 63-4, 65, 76.

250

The Small Voice of History

Hindu mythology, serves as Siva’s carrier. And so on. All ofwhich helps
to rationalize in the eyes of the wretched of this world their wretchedness
in otherworldly terms.

However, it will be one-sided, hence false, to speak of this typically
religious consciousness as nothing more than a device to reconcile the
dregs of Hindu society to their lot. There are other components of the
same consciousness, expressed in a parallel set of myths and legends
fabricated by the same subaltern fantasy, which use religiosity at least
as a cahierdedoUance if not quite a proclamation of revolt. To recognize
this is to define that threshold beyond which humanity would not
put up with its own debasement, and that threshold is built into the
spiritual condition of the masses despite an elitist notion to the con-
trary about their uncritical acceptance of fate.

Elements of a critique are quite clearly inscribed in the belief system
of these castes. It is a critique which is oriented towards a defiance
rather than acceptance of the regime of social and cultural dominance
imposed on them, although it is not matched by any practice articulate
and strong enough to turn the world upside down. On the contrary,
it is precisely this failure on its part to realize its potential that allows
the mock practice of ritual to manipulate it into the service of that
very dominance. In other words, it is a theoretical consciousness which
registers a sense of genuine distress, but lacking, as it does, the support
of any truly and adequately corresponding practice, ends up as an
opiate to induce passivity. This contradiction lies at the very heart of
lower-caste religiosity. The tendency it has to incline in favour of the
ruling culture must therefore be taken together with its Other — the
tendency which pulls in the opposite direction towards dissent.

Some of the myths and cults of the Dom Group speak eloquently
of that contrary — and yet complementary — tendency. This is manifest
in that spiritual audacity which has led to the elevation to divine status
of a number of empirical and mythic figures utterly non grata to the
ruling culture. Typical of the former are those real-life thieves and
bandits who have been apotheosized after their death, and of the latter
those legendary heroes whose fantastic achievements have impressed

251

The Career of an Anti-God

the weak and the meek of this land as parables of superhuman power —
physical as well as spiritual. Taken together, they represent the spiritual
legacy of two historic displacements brought about by Aryanization
and colonization. Large sections of those populations who were in-
sufficiently absorbed in the material culture of an agrarian society and
the spiritual culture of Brahmanical Hinduism, and remained unassi-
milated, by and large, even under the Raj, found for themselves an
alternative way of life in crime and, corresponding to that, alternative
strains of religion which transformed the criminal into a godling.

This process which amounted to a reversal of some of the dominant
values of Hindu society and spiritualized what was, for its custod-
ians, grossly antisocial, had been active long enough to constitute a
counter-tradition. Kosambi writes of a west country goddess, Bolhai,
as supposed to have gone with some brigands ( corn ), which is a sure
indication , according to him, ‘that she had been the patroness of an
untamed tribe for a long time/39 In much the same way, the bandit
godlings Goraiya and Salesh worshipped by the Dosadh, the burglar
Gandak hanged for his crime but apotheosized by the Maghaiya Dom
along with his consort Samaiya, and Syam Singh the robber chief re-
garded by the entire Dom family as a patron deity and ancestor, are all
witness to the autochthonic prehistory of these castes.40The suggestion
of an ‘untamed' tribal past is further strengthened by the representa-
tion of these deities in lumps and stones rather than the iconic form
characteristic of the Hindu pantheon, as well as by such typically non-
Brahmanical ritual offerings as pigs, cocks, and liquor addressed to
them.

The bandit god whose cult, unlike that of the others, was not con-
fined to particular localities, was Valmiki. The claim, supported by
Briggs,41 that he was ‘a member of one of the aboriginal tribes of mid-
India’, may be open to doubt. However, there can be no question about
his divine standing among some of the lowliest castes throughout the

39 Kosambi, Culture and Civilisation , p. 48.

40 For these godlings, see Briggs, The Dorns , pp. 465-7* Grierson, Bihar
Peasant Lifct pp. 406, 409; Buchanan, Purnea , pp. 249-50.

41 Briggs, The Doms , p. 41. The information in the rest of this paragraph is
based on ibid., pp. 52, 54-5, 56, 60-2, 64-5.

252

The Small Voice of History

subcontinent, including the South. The legend about his career as a
man of violence who ultimately redeemed himself through penance is
shared by all sections of the Hindus. But the outcastes have made him
their own by integrating that motif into a number of their ancestral
myths. One of these designates him as the father of Kalu and Jivan to
whom the Dom and the Bhangi trace, respectively, their descent. In
a few other tales he is variously identified with the Bhangi ancestor
Lai Beg himself, or with his son, or with Supach Bhagat, the legendary
founder of the Dom caste, or with Nakula, one of the Pandava broth-
ers, who is promoted to the status of the first Bhangi by a nimble play
on words.

The latter merits some comment as yet another linguistic de-
vice with a transformative function in this particular cycle of myths.
There is, for instance, the story which ascribes the origin of the met-
ric structure of the sloka to Valmiki s declamation in the Ramayana,
beginning with the words ma nisada , addressed to a hunter after a
particularly cruel act of killing.42 Again, there are folktales, in many
variants,43 about his absolution from sin, thanks to a coincidence in
sound between the continuous utterance of the vile and by implication
polluting word for death, march and that of the phonetically reverse
and sanctifying name of the divine hero Rama.

What distinguishes the Bhangi myth from the others in this series
is its grafting into an episode of the other epic and the identification
of Valmiki with Nakula, brought about, according to Briggs, by a
semantic manipulation on the word bdlmik> meaning ‘good lad’. This
was supposed to have been used by his brothers who coaxed him, so
the legend goes, to remove a carcass and deserted him while he was
doing so. Then, by yet another verbal twist, Nakula, reconstituted now
as Balmik, hence — thanks to a mythopoeic slide — Valmiki, is trans-
formed into Supach Bhagat as the divinely ordained progenitor of
those who live by making and selling the winnowing fan {sup) used to
sift flour for ‘cooking’ \^pac = to cook) bread.44 In the Ramayana the

42 See JRdmayanam (Adikanda: II, 15-18). This verse structure is, however,
said to be older than that epic, for the metre occurs already in the Vedas. J.
Dowson, A Classical Dictionary of Hindu Mythology , etc. (Ix^ndon: 1950),
p. 333.

43 For several versions of these tales, see Briggs, The Dorns , pp. 55, 59, 61.

44 Briggs, The Doms , pp. 64-5, has this story.

253

The Career of an Anti-God

reformed bandit-turned-poet extols the slaying of a highly virtuous
Sudra as an act of exemplary justice, for the latter had offended the
Brahmans by coveting spiritual excellence and its rewards to an ex-
tent attainable by none but the elite castes. The Bhangi turns the tables
on the latter and uses his own words and imagination to mould the
unreformed bandit into an ancestor and patron saint without the least
effort to ‘sanskritize’ him. If the concept of social banditry may be said
to be an acknowledgement of that ambivalent morality which informs
the type of subaltern practice stigmatized indiscriminately as crime,
the apotheosization of Valmiki and a host of delinquent godlings
must rank as a powerful tribute to that morality and the notion that
goes with it.

The alternative morality and the criticism it implies are exemplified
not merely in the spiritualization of banditry. Some of this inversive
tendency shows up also in an explicit avowal of that notorious rebel of
Hindu mythology — King Vena.45 Brahmanical literature is stacked
with tales about his wickedness. Manu (ix, 66) accuses him of intro-
ducing or at least tolerating widow marriage, which is reprehended
by the learned of the twice-born castes as fit for cattle/ According to
Padma-Purdna, he had started off well as a ruler but strayed into Jaina
heresy. But his worst crime, according to the sacred authorities,
appears to have been the banning of all ritual sacrifice, gift, or oblation
except what was addressed to himself. ‘I am for ever the lord of offer-
ings’, he declared. When the rishis, who customarily officiated at these
rites and appropriated the gifts offered to gods, remonstrated with
him, he answered them with scorn: ‘Who is this Hari whom you
style the lord of sacrifices? Brahma . . . and whatever other gods there
be . . . are present in the person of a King . . .’ That was too much for
the sages and the priests to put up with and they slew him with blades
of kusa grass, used euphemistically in the Puranic stories as a weapon
for cutting up the enemies of the gods. Mlecchas and the wild tribes
of the Vindhya region called Nishadas issued from his body, according
to legend, and the Dom themselves claim descent from him, as a recall
perhaps of their own tribal origin. Whatever the historical basis of such
a claim, it would certainly agree with the spirit of defiance one finds

45 The sources of our material on the legend ofVena as used in this paragraph
are Briggs, The Dorns* pp. 26, 66, 67; and Dowson, Classical Dictionary* p. 354.

254 The Small Voice of History

in some elements of the Dom tradition, such as those relating to the
Basti— Gorakhpur rulers of this caste who are said to have upset the
Brahmans by proposing to marry their daughters.

Rahu too is an enemy of the gods and bete noire of the Brahmans. Its
cultic standing among the members of the Dom Group is yet another
instance of lower- caste resistance to the hegemony of varna- Hindu
culture. Buchanan-Hamilton, to whom we owe one of the first and
most elaborate descriptions of this cult as found in the Purnea region
during the early years of the nineteenth century,46 noticed how it pro-
vided the Dosadhs of Nathpur with an occasion to flaunt the power
of their own rituals as an obvious act of defiance against the Brahmans.
The worship of Rahu assumed there the form of a sacrifice, and cen-
tral to this was an act of fire-walking by the chief officiant ( bhakat ),
himself a Dosadh, who functioned also as a spirit-medium.47 Com-
menting on the mood of the crowd as it watched the bhakat put his
hands into a pot of boiling water and then walk barefoot thrice over
a three-and-a-half metre long bed of burning coal without being
scalded or burned, Buchanan-Hamilton wrote, cIt was evident . . . that
the whole spectators, who were numerous, believed in the influence of
this god, and ar least all the Dosadhs and probably most of the others
considered the imposition of the deity as what enabled the fellow to
resist the effects of the fire. His followers exultingly challenged the Brah-
mans who were in my company to imitate the priest .’48 The outcome
of that contest did not reflect favourably on ‘the Pandit of the mission’
led by the sahib.

Even more than such affirmation of ritual power it is the lower-caste
myths about eclipse which illuminate the contradiction between elite
and subaltern religious idioms. These myths run parallel to the Pura-
nic version {Myth 1) and, taken together, they make up a series with
an independent ideological standing. However, this series does not

46 Buchanan, Purnea , pp. 249-52.

47 For some later accounts of this ceremony, see Risley, Tribes and Castes ,
pp. 255-6; and Dalton, Descriptive Ethnology, p. 326.

48 Buchanan, Purnea , p. 252; emphasis added.

255

The Career of an Anti-God

operate in isolation. On the contrary, it works on the classical Hindu
myths with its own motifs and transforms them, first, by positing
an existential connection between Rahu and his adherents within
the Dom Group, and, secondly by grounding — earthing’ would be
a more expressive term — that connection in the material and social
conditions of those castes. The sum of the structural changes brought
about by this dual operation is what constitutes the specificity of
lower-caste ideology in this particular instance.

How these subaltern communities take over the Puranic matiriel
and make it their own may be seen in the following story.

Myth 2

Rama, on his return from the defeat of Ravana in Lanka, gave a feast
to his victorious army. Mahadeva (Siva) and Parvati were serving the
meals. Presently Mahadeva drew the attention of Parvati to the pre-
sence of a low-caste Mang boy ... in the assembly, and asked her
to be careful, and to serve him the meals from a distance. But as soon
as Rama saw the Mang he slew him for daring to mar the sacredness
of the feast by his impure presence. The mother of the slain boy took
up the head, placed it in a basket and tried in vain to resuscitate it with
fresh water. With the basket containing the head of her lost son, she
went to the gods and goddesses begging for her meals. In turn she goes
to the sun and moon, threatening to touch them if her request is not
granted, thus desecrating their sacred character. It is the shadow of her
basket that causes the eclipse, and so it is to remove this Mang woman,
this importunate creditor, that people are asked to give offerings to the
luminaries and alms to the Mang caste.49

The elements of transformation can be picked up at a glance. The
textual site of Myth 1 was the Mahabharata; that shifts now to the
Ramayana. There the host and slayer was Visnu; here it is Rama. The
offender and victim in this story is no t an anti-god, but an untouchable,
executed, like Sambuka, for overstepping the limits of his prescrib-
ed rights. Correspondingly, his offence consists not so much in stealing
the food of the gods as in polluting them by his presence at a meal.
Unlike the Puranic story the sequel to beheading in Myth 2 does

49 Penzer, ‘Note on Rahu, p. 82.

256

The Small Voice of History

not emphasize revenge but the search for justice by a mother deprived
of her son and, by implication, breadwinner; and it takes the traditional
form of importunate begging for alms — dharna — from all the gods
(because the unjust act was committed by Rama, an incarnation of
Visnu, the leader of the entire pantheon) rather than that of a recursive
act of aggression against the sun and the moon, the informers in
Myth L

The key to this entire series of transformations is the operation
which identifies Rahu with the Mang and attributes to him all the
conditions of the latters social being. It is an existential operation
common to many Indian myths in which the divine and the human
are collapsed and mutually identified. The operators used for this pur-
pose are of three kinds — grammatical, genealogical, and cultic. The
grammatical operator functions as a copula bonding any two terms in
the general form: A is B. In Myth 2, Rahu is a Mang. Again, according
to some folklore collected by Russell and Lai in Madhya Pradesh, Rahu
is a sweeper (Mehtar or Bhangi).30The genealogical operator comes in
the form: A is an ancestor ofB. The Dosadhs ofTirhut in Bihar claimed
Rahu (locally known as Raha or Rah) as an ancestor who was killed in
a battle,31 while those of Mirzapur also boasted of their descent from
Rahu who, according to a legend still charged with the memory of the
Puranic conflict, was ‘shut up in the temple of Jagannath [i.e. Visnu]
at Puri’ as he made his way from Bengal to Uttar Pradesh.32 The west
country Mang, too, were said to be of the race of the demons which
swallow the moon at the time of eclipse.’53 The function of the cul-
tic operator ( B worships A) is to assign a ritual following to a deity.
This is yet another existential linkage, because the relation between
a worshipper and his pacron deity is supposed to be the same as that
between a child and its parent. In effect, therefore, the functions of
the last two operators are interchangeable, and that being so, the adher-
ents of the cult related to Rahu as a classificatory progeny, even when,

50 Russell and Lai, Tribes and Castes , p. 232.

31 A. Cunningham and H.B.W. Garrick, Report of Tours in North and South
Bihar m 1880-81 (Archaeological Survev of India, vol. XVI; reprint, Delhi:
1969), p. 28.

32 Crooke, Tribes and Castes , pp. 349-50.

33 Briggs, The Dorns, pp. 543-4.

The Career of an Anti-God 257

unlike the Dosadh and the Mang, some of them had no origin myths
to show for it.

This existential bonding is of the utmost significance for the ideo-
logical structures under discussion. It confers on these outcaste groups
the role of mediators between an eclipse and all it threatens by its
malevolence and impurity. As Rahu s people, they alone are believed
to have the power to coax him to release the sun and the moon from
his grip. Ironically, thus, it is the weakest and the most despised sec-
tions of Hindu society who are called upon to save it from pollution
and destruction. This endows them with a spurious authority which
accrues, characteristically, to the ‘intermediate situation by virtue of
the fact that ‘it comprises the opposite poles, and ultimately always
appears as a one-sidedly higher power vis-a-vis the extremes themselves/
That, according to Marx,54 is equally true of the mediatory status of
exchange value in the world of wealth and the role of intermediaries
of the spiritual world. ‘Thus, in the religious sphere, Christ, the medi-
ator between God and humanity — a mere instrument of circula-
tion between the two — becomes their unity, God-man, and, as such,
becomes more important than God; the saints more important than
Christ; the popes more important than the saints/ In much the same
way the outcaste, mediating as he does in a situation of the utmost
antagonism between Rahu and a luminary, appears to be more im-
portant than either. He seems to have power over both — over the
former in so far as he can make the monster disgorge the planet, and
over the latter and all others dependent on the sun and the moon
for their survival, in so far as he alone can offer them the protection
they need.

The importance of the lower-caste mediators who are identified
thus with Rahu by linguistic usage as well as by cult and sacred lineage
is acknowledged ritually by the gifts showered on them during an
eclipse. As the Doras, who worship these demons are able to induce
them to release the moon, pious people give alms to these castes at
eclipses in order to secure their good offices to release the moon/55
This description of the custom as it prevailed in Uttar Pradesh coin-
cides with Risleys observations in Bengal and Bihar at about the same

54 Karl Marx, Grundrisse (Harmondsworth: 1973), pp. 331-2.

55 Crooke, Popular Religion, p. 320.

258

The Small Voice of History

time, except that the gift in this region came not as alms but copper
coins put out by the upper-caste householders for the Dom to col-
lect.56 Again, in Madhya Pradesh, the belief that Rahu was either a
sweeper or the deity of the sweepers’ made people give them alms
during an eclipse in order to appease him and cause him to let the
luminaries go.’57 Further west, in Gujarat, on such occasions, ‘as soon
as the darkening sets in, the Bhangis go about shouting, “ Garhandan ,
Vastradan , Rupadari\ or “gifts for the eclipse, gifts of clothes, gifts
of silver”.’58

From the standpoint of the elite castes, these gifts can only be regarded
as a price they have to pay for the return of peace in the heavens and
purity on earth. The suggestion of a douceur meant to pacify the
polluting monster on a rampage is inscribed in the very name of the
ritual activity, sdnti, ‘the rite of appeasement’, prescribed for this occa-
sion.59 Indeed, no other interpretation of these gifts is possible if
viewed in the characteristically Brahmanica! terms of Myth L

But viewed from the standpoint of the outcaste recipient, the gifts
lend themselves to a very different interpretation construed in terms
of the parallel myth mentioned above — Myth 2. There the alms soli-
cited so importunately by the Mang woman stand for a right to which
she was entitled as a person left without any means of supporting
herself because of her son’s murder. What she earned by begging might
have been the equivalent of conscience money for the gods whose
leaders, Rama (= Visnu) and Siva, were, respectively, the perpetrator
and instigator of that violence. For the aggrieved mother, however,

56 Risley, Tribes and Castes , p. 247.

57 Russell and Ijd, Tribes and Castes , p. 232.

58 Ibid.

59 The ritual gifts for this occasion could include, according to Kane, horses,
chariots, cows, land, sesame, ghee, etc. as well as figures of gold. The ddna -
mantra addressed to Rahu during this rirual speaks clearly of its pacificatory
function:

tamomaya mahabhima somasuryavimardana

hematarapradanena mama santiprado bhaba.

P.V. Kane, History of Dharmasasfi as, vol. V, pt. II (Poona: 1962), p. 766.

259

The Career of an Anti-God

asking for a modicum of subsistence was a highly moral act — a quest
for a just recompense. By the same token, the reciprocal act of alms-
giving, too, represented a morality. Indeed, it would be altogether
wrong to withhold from her what was rightfully her due. For the
Hindu ideal of the gift — dana — is conceptualized as a two-way ex-
change involving the donor and the donee in a relationship of mutual
dependence which is no less spiritual than it is material. The rules of
the ‘economic theology* (as Marcel Mauss called it) governing this
transaction prescribe hierarchically graded entitlements to resources
on the part of individuals and groups for the satisfaction of their mater-
ial and spiritual needs in such a way as to constitute a moral right. To
share their resources is, therefore, a duty on the part of those who have
them. But it involves no loss. On the contrary, they have much to gain
in spiritual merit and, what is equally important, in material wealth as
well. For the thing given ‘may automatically bring the donor an equi-
valent return — it is not lost to him, but reproductive; or else the donor
finds the thing itself again, but with increase.*60 By responding charit-
ably to the outcaste beggar the patrons could, therefore, be said to have
done themselves a favour: it is not only that they were assured of an
equivalent return or even an increase of the resources parted with; they
also managed thereby to sidestep the sin of interrupting the reciprocal
flow of asking and receiving which is what constitutes dana.

What happens to the donor when he allows that flow to be inter-
rupted in spite of his best efforts is illustrated by the fate of Harischandra.
That legendary king had responded to a Brahmans demand for a gift
by offering all he wanted including gold, his own son, wife, body, life,
kingdom, good fortune.* The Brahman took him at his word and
stripped him of everything until he was forced to sell, first his wife and
child, and then himself to redeem his pledge. The last of these trans-
actions— the ultimate misery — involved a Chandala as the purchaser.
In an adaptation of this Puranic story by the Dom, it is Kalubir, their
ancestor, who is said to have acquired the unfortunate king at that sale
and treated him so well that ‘in return the Raja converted the whole
tribe to his religion.’61 This is why they claim to receive gifts on his
behalf at an eclipse. ‘When the raja came back from heaven to wander

60 M. Mauss, The Gift (London: 1974), p. 55.

61 Risley, Tribes and Castes , p. 246.

260

The Small Voice of History

and to beg’, they explain, ‘God said that if anyone refused to feed him,
the sun and moon would disappear. That is why Dorns collect alms
when an eclipse occurs; because his spirit is calling for food.’62 Haris-
chandra appears here with his role reversed: instead of being the donor
he was in the original version of the myth, he is made out to be the
receiver. However, nothing is changed about the significance of dana
as a reciprocal act in which asking must be matched by giving. To break
that sequence by any lapse in charity could ruin not only an individual
householder but the entire universe by disturbing the sequence of
planetary movements.

The motif of dana occurs in yet another eclipse story, but with a less
significant part to play in its structure.

Myth 3

The sun and the moon were brothers. A hungry worshipper came to
them, saying, ‘I am poor and hungry. Give me something to eat.’ The
brothers went to a sweeper-woman and said, ‘Give this man grain.’ She
agreed to give grain to the beggar for a year. She was directed by the
brothers to take the grain out of the bin from below, and they agreed
to fill it by putting the grain in from the top. During the year the
sun and moon were unable to fill the bin, and when the year was up,
the woman said, ‘Now pay me, for the bin is not full.’ They were unable
to pay her and hid themselves. Now, when eclipses occur, the worshippers
of the sun and moon collect various kinds of grain, mix them, and dis-
tribute them to beggars, and thus deliver the sun and moon from
shame.63

What is remarkable about this story is that it is told without the
aid of any Puranic idiom. There is no mention here of Rahu, no retreat
into the Hindu bestiary to account for a natural phenomenon. We are,
of course, still in the realm of fantasy, bur one that is made up of at least
some identifiable chunks of reality. An explanation of the heavenly
disorders is offered here in terms of the all-too-familiar elements of
our village life, such as the hunger and want of a lean season, begging
for food, borrowing from a neighbour to meet ones social obligations

62 Briggs, The Dorns , p. 546.

63 Ibid., p. 545.

261

The Career of an Anti-God

towards the needy, and the shame of not being able to repay. These are
assembled in the story in order to give a heavenly scenario the verisi-
militude of earthiness. The object of this exercise in the artless art of
subaltern discourse is to suspend disbelief about what is truly fantastic.
For what can be more fantastic than the upper-caste worshippers of
the sun and moon going hungry while the Bhangi and Mehtar have
bins full of grain than the former having to beg and their divine patrons
to borrow and the latter having enough to spare? Rural society seems
to have turned upside down, but only, alas, within the inverted world
of religious thinking.

Yet it will be wrong to dismiss even that inversion as without signi-
ficance. For it is nothing other than a consciousness articulated as a
recognition by the despised and the poor of their own debasement and
the need to overcome it. Unable to find redress in real life they compen-
sate for it in wishful thinking. This wish is still too feeble to actualize
itself as a project powered by a radical will. Nevertheless, it is a wish
predicated on a critique of the social and cultural conditions of subal-
ternity.

What is of importance for us in the present discussion is that with
all its infantile fumbling this critique bears in it the seeds of a develop-
ment. We met the very first moment of that development in its
emergent phase when it spoke only in the language borrowed from the
upper-caste culture which it had set out so diffidently to criticize. But
there were indications, already in Myth 2, of its urge to rearrange and
transpose the Puranic material and fit it into the outcastes social ex-
perience and imageries derived from it. Then, in Myth 3, we find subal-
tern religiosity come to its own. It replaces the baroque impedimenta
of Brahmanical mythology by a world of fantasy constructed out of the
stuff of lower-caste existence in everyday life. In that process it relegates
the archaic motif of dana to the background and allows the motif of
the unredeemed loan to dominate the narrative — all ofwhich amounts
to a significant, if still rather small, shift away from economic theo-
logy’ in the direction of political economy.

VII

This development continues in a series which finally recasts the story
of P-ahus conflict with the sun and the moon in terms of a real

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The Small Voice of History

antagonism within our society — the all-too-painfully real antagonism
between debtor and creditor. To cite a fairly representative version
which comes from Madhya Pradesh:

Myth 4

. . . the sun and moon are in Rahu s debt, and he comes and duns them,
and this is the eclipse; and the alms given to the sweepers are a means
of paying the debt.64

It is found in several variants, some of which, like those quoted below,
come with strikingly realistic details.

Myth5

. . . the sun owes the sweeper a debt which he refuses to pay. The
sweeper, however, is not to be put off easily and sits dharna at the suns
door ... his dark shadow can be seen quite clearly. In time the debt
is paid and the sweeper departs.65

Myth 6

. . . both the sun and the moon at one time borrowed something from
Dhrubh [i.e. Rahu] . . . This debt must be repaid, and if at any time
the sun or the moon is not able to pay on the debt, it is attacked by
Dhrubh who begins to devour it. He never quite does so, however, and
vomits it up, as there is still money owing and payments must go on.66

With these tales the career of Rahu quits its original site in the Puranic
heaven and finds itself grounded in the earthy material which makes
up the life of its cultic adherents. Consequently, what began as a story
of celestial violence is transformed into one of social violence. In reality
(as against what happens in myth) that violence, operating as it often
does in the vicious form of chronic indebtedness and bond slavery,
counts the members of the Dom Group among its worst victims. The
condition of the eponymous caste, as described by Briggs towards

64 Russell and Lai, Tribes and Castes , p. 232.

65 Penzer, ‘Note on Rahu , p. 82.

66 W.G. Griffiths, The Kol Tribe of Central India (Calcutta: 1946), p. 131.

263

The Career of an Anti-God

the end of British rule in India, speaks for all of them: ‘Debt constitutes
one of the most heavy of all the economic burdens which the Dorns
have to bear. ... A not unusual rate of interest is four annas on the
rupee per month, which adds up to 300 per cent per year. Descendants
of debtors assume debts of their ancestors even to seven generations
and more and pay/67 According to an observer in a region of Uttar
Pradesh in 1 93 1 , the Dom was ‘like a serf, either traditionally attached
to some old thokdari family from generation to generation or a life-
long slave to the money-lender/68 His poverty, cultural backwardness
and, occasionally, recourse to crime for a living could all be explained
by the burden of debt under which he laboured.

As a prisoner of debt his idea of power relied largely on his own ex-
perience of the creditor s power over himself. For the oppressed every-
where tend to model their image of authority first of all on their
own oppressors. This is why the idealization of the moneylender is a
common feature of the folklore of many castes and communities for
whom chronic and in some cases hereditary indebtedness is a living
tradition. Among the Dhurwa of Bastar, for instance, a legend about
an orphans success in life has the status of a sahukar made out as his
highest achievement.69 The Grasia of Bombay and Rajasthan, cruelly
exploited by Banias, attribute to the latter the power to reduce rain-
fall, create drought and thereby add to their profit from higher grain
prices.70 Idealization of this order is stretched to its limit in the Rahu
myths. Those who are reduced to a state of near servitude by the
moneylender pay him the ultimate tribute of making a moneylender
of their own patron deity. The apotheosization of the usurer could
hardly go further.

But if that is the way for the Dom, Dosadh, Bhangi, and Mang to
acknowledge the creditors power, it is also their way of liberating
themselves from it. For, identified as they are with Rahu as his pro-
geny, pujari, or simply as an emanation, they transform themselves
into creditors by the same idealizing process, and destroy, in the ideal

67 Briggs, The Doms, p. 187.

68 Ibid.

69 K.N.Thusu, The Dhurwa of Bastar (Calcutta: 1965), pp. 219-20.

70 PC. Dave, The Grasias (Delhi: 1960), p. 65.

264

The Small Voice of History

world, that thraldom which, in the real world, they are unable to over-
come. Khdtak (= khddak)7l that is, consumers of credit themselves in
the society they live in, they assume, with Rahu, the role of devourer
of the celestial debtors. This irony — the spectacle of the oppressed
dressing up as oppressors — is that imprint which negative consciousness
leaves on many an attempt to turn the real world upside down. But as
our reading of Myths 4-6 demonstrates, that irony is not absent from
the inversions which occur in the world of religion either.

VIII

There is no doubt therefore that the graduation of Rahu from heaven
to earth does not achieve anything but a false liberation. Yet it will
be wrong to conclude that we are still where we had been at the start.
Quite the contrary, we are now, at the end of the series, separated by
a considerable distance from Myth L How long ago was it that the
primordial ocean was churned and gods and demons fought over their
share of ambrosia? How long ago the beheading at the Feast of Im-
mortality? We stand now within our own time and with our feet plant-
ed (not as firmly yet, perhaps, as one would have liked) on the native
ground of our own experience. It is true that the explanation for a
natural phenomenon like the eclipse is still being sought in myth and
not in science. But it is no longer a myth that has gods and monsters
as its protagonists — but people. It is a myth which has transformed a
contest for amrta into one for control over such material resources as
mortals live by. As such, what was a figment of Brahmanical fantasy has
been fashioned by the naive imagination of the poor and the oppressed
into a fable for our times.

‘Rahu became the enemy of the Sun and the Moon , says the
Matsya-Purdnam in its version of the legend, and he takes vengeance
on them even up to the present day at the time of their eclipses.’72 Rahu
has not yet avenged himself fully to his own satisfaction and must

71 These two words can be used interchangeably, both in Hindi and Sanskrit,
to mean consumer as well as ‘debtor. See Ramchandra Varma, Manak Hindi
Kosh , vol. II, and Radhakanta Deva, Sahdakalpadruma , pt. II.

72 The Matsya-Purdnam, pt. II, ed. B.D. Basu (Allahabad: 1917), p. 290.

265

The Career of an Anti-God

continue his relentless pursuit. However, it is to his advantage that his
enemies have been tracked down to earth. The struggle, judging by
these tales, is still being waged in the head; however, it has now a better
prospect than ever of materializing itself in that social struggle for
which the last three myths could be taken as a metaphor.

The Millenarian Space

To speak of millenarian space is of course to step into a paradox.
For the phrase millenarian has nothing but time as its referent.
What, one may ask, has space to do with so obviously temporal
a concept? I should like to address this paradox first by going over the
facts of a South Asian movement of 1899-1900 identified by Peter
Worsley as an instance of millenarianism.

The protagonists of this movement were an autochthonous
population of about 438,000, known as the Munda, who had claimed
a wooded and hilly region of eastern India as their original homeland.
The claim was justified both by history and folk memory on the
ground that they had inhabited these tracts for some centuries, cleared
the jungle, cultivated the land, established villages governed by their
own headmen, formed kinship networks to ensure biological and
social reproduction, and developed a culture endowed with a profound
sense of belonging to a place of their own — a place where contiguity
intersected with consanguinity and topos merged with ethnos.

That sense of place was heightened and reinforced as a result of
the integration of this area in Britain’s subcontinental empire during
the nineteenth century. For the advent of a money economy and the
growth of a land market combined with the jural and other institutions
of the Raj to allow the transfer of large parts of what they had always
regarded as their ancestral domain into the hands of non-autochthonous
landlords, moneylenders, and traders. These latter were designated

Copyright © 1990 Ranajit Guha. First presented to the Anthropology
Workshop of the Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National Uni-
versity, Canberra, 1990.

The Millenarian Space 267

by the Munda as the diku — a word which translated as alien , out-
sider, ‘stranger , or ‘foreigner — all to signify the autochthons other in
terms of a twofold distinction in physical space and ethnic space.
When, therefore, Munda resistance to the diku assumed the form of
a violent and widespread uprising, known as the Ulgulan in the rebels’
own language, it came to rely for much of its power on this doubly
articulated sense of space.

Triggered by resentment about the loss of their traditional land and
the hardship this had caused, the Ulgulan was for the Munda an agrar-
ian struggle with a well-defined spatial objective, namely, the recovery
of those lands. The diku, their adversaries in that struggle, were aliens
physically distanced from them: they had come from the plains to
intrude into the tribal uplands with the connivance and support of
those other foreigners — the white men armed with guns and laws.
Culturally too the diku were regarded as outsiders beyond the pale of
that ethnic space where custom, religion, morality, and language made
the Munda feel proud and secure in their difference from their ene-
mies. No wonder that their struggle for land developed into a cultural
conflict with a pronounced religious idiom.

The spatial determination was equally evident in the politics of the
movement. Birsa, its leader, had already underscored this on the eve of
the insurrection when he set out on a tour of what he described as
ancestral sites. A network of temples and early settlements, these sites
were visited by him to remind his people of the territory they had lost
and to mobilize them in order to win it back. When the Ulgulan broke
out soon afterwards, this sense of place helped to change its narrowly
economic and racial orientation into one of a struggle for power. The
urge to put an end to rack-renting, indebtedness, forced labour, and
alienation of land was promptly overtaken by an urgency to recover
that autonomy which the Munda believed they had once enjoyed in
their homeland.

Since such an aim could be realized only by the destruction of colo-
nial rule, Birsa announced his intention to march to Delhi and occu-
py, as he put it, the ‘throne’ there, and ‘rule in die land’. And he gave
notice of that audacious project by a ritual dance in the course ofwhich
the British empire was brought to an end by the symbolic slaughter of
an effigy of its queen.

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The Small Voice of History

It should be clear from this account that the Ulgulan was informed
by a sense of space in its motivation, its mobilization, its strategy, and
its ideology. That sense of space had its correlate in a sense of time as
well, expressed in its most generalized form as a pair of temporalities
in which then* contrasted with ‘now’, past with present, or as codified
by Birsa loosely after Hindu mythology, Satjug — the Age of Truth —
with Kaljug — the Dark Age of Evil. In each instance, the first term of
the antinomy stood for all that was positive in the material and spiri-
tual life of the Munda in an idealized past and the second for its reverse
in a sadly inglorious present. A chiliastic vision of the end of Kaljug and
the promise of a return to Satjug featured prominently in Birsa s ser-
mons urging his followers to hasten the latter by taking up arms against
the diku. Its effect was to charge the rhetoric of the movement with
nostalgia and persuade interpreters like Worsley to classify it as a typi-
cally millenarian phenomenon.

I suggest that these interpreters have been rash in characterizing the
movement by its temporal rather than spatial aspect. For the evidence
leaves one hardly in doubt about the primacy of the latter in Munda
thinking about the Ulgulan. Their concern for the recovery of lost
territory, insistence on the expulsion of aliens from the tribal uplands,
and aim to reconstitute the latter as an autonomous realm were all
witness to that primacy of spatiality which they had themselves ins-
cribed in their description of the event as mulkui larai- — a fight for a
place of their own. Any interpretation which fails to acknowledge
that between the spatial and the temporal — or if you please, the utop-
ian and the millenarian — moments of the movement the balance is
weighted in favour of the former, is likely to miss the specificity of the
experience.

Attention to specificity has not of course been the strong point of
millenarian studies. On the contrary, a side-effect of Norman Cohns
influential monograph, during the thirty years since its publication,
has been to encourage a rather indiscriminate lumping of categorically
disparate experiences and phenomena under the umbrella term of
millenarianism.1 Comparativists from all possible disciplines pounced
on the historically specific experience — the experience of medieval

1 Norman Cohn, Pursuit of the Millennium (London: Seeker and Warburg,
1957).

269

The Millenarian Space

Europe — addressed in his work and extended it by parallelism to other
times and places. The result has been to blur distinctions in such a way
as to make it hard to understand how the social, political, religious,
aesthetic, and other ideas and activities interact in any particular case
called millenarian to process and pattern its difference from other ins-
tances designated by the same name. For it is that difference which
constitutes the originality and individuality of the phenomenon in
question and any description which does not help us to grasp it is
obviously less than adequte.

Indeed, I feel that the comparative method, as applied to millenarian
studies, has been less than helpful in this respect. Its effect has been to
generate a globalizing mania to collect and compile a mass of data
which have no internal limits, boundaries, and definitions to justify
agglomeration and are contained arbitrarily within a loosely defined
theme by the force of an overgeneralized temporality.

The conceptual difficulty and erosion of specificity which follow
inevitably from this method are well documented in Bryan Wilsons
Magic and the Millennium } Faced with the enormous amount of
material which had accumulated under the millenarian rubric during
the sixteen years that separated his book from Cohns, Wilson started
by trying to delimit the scope of his work. But this involved so much
semantic stretching and corner-cutting to decide what might or might
not be included in his study that he ended up by playing safe and stack-
ing his dragnet with all that could be found on the millennial ocean bed
from minnows to whales, from shamanism, messianism, chilianism,
thaumaturgy, and so on to the Shakers, the Peyots, the Mau Mau, the
Hau Hau, the Ku Klux Klan, the Bambata Rising, the Marching Rule,
Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Ghost Dance — you name it, he got it. An
index of the principal movements, tribes, and persons mentioned in
the book has 479 entries. Not all of these are identified by him as
millenarian, but the figure is still an index of the range of phenomena
he found deposited on the field when he set out to survey it.

Which makes me wonder why all the resistance to lumping and
blurring, which is so scrupulously cultivated by the social sciences,
is allowed to collapse when it comes to millenarianism. Why, for

2 Bryan R. Wilson, Magic and the Millennium (New York: Harper & Row,
1973).

270 The Small Voice of History

instance, it should be possible to read, contrary to all evidence, time
for space, millennium for utopia, not only in the Indian case I have pre-
sented to you, but many other cases from other countries and cultures
as well? Is it because Reason has found in millenarianism all too handy
a doxa that allows it to naturalize (as Bourdieu would have put it) its
commitment to the notion of linear time and help Western culture to
define itself negatively in relation to those cultures which still have
some use for a time that is cyclical, plural, and recursive? Insofar as
Anthropology speaks for that Reason, is its absent-minded ramble into
millenarian space simply a temporal foil to those disciplined adventures
in the physical and social spaces of other cultures whereby it distances
itself more from the latter the more it comes to know them?

Chandra’s Death

This essay begins with a transgression — a title that is designed to
violate the intentions for which the material reproduced below
has already served with two authorities — the authority of the
law which recorded the event in its present form and that of the editor
who separated it from other itemsdn an archive and gave it a place in
another order — a book of documents collected for their sociological
interest. The movement between these two intentions — the laws and
the scholars — suggests the interposition of other wills and purposes.
Whatever these were — anthropological, literary, administrative, or any
other — they had, from time to time, given this material names and
functions in some very differently constructed series and under differ-
ent classifications. We know nothing of them except that they must
have occurred. Yet the very fact that they occurred, in whatever unspeci-
fied ways, would justify yet another intervention — a return to the
terminal points of the shift, the only visible sites of legal and editorial
intentionality, in order to desecrate them by naming the material once
again and textualizing it for a new purpose. That purpose is to reclaim
the document for history. Here is to quote it in extenso}

Copyright © 1987 Ranajit Guha. First published in Ranajit Guha, ed.,
Subaltern Studies K (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 135-65.

1 This document is published as item no. 380 in PMCS , my abbreviation
for Panchanan Mandal (ed.), Chithipatre Samajchitra, vol. 2 (Calcutta: 1953),
pp. 277-8. It is taken from the archives of Viswabharad University. Its date is
given as 1 255 according to the Bengali year. Since the event of which it speaks
occurred in the month of Choitra (see footnote 2 below), the corresponding
date, according to the Christian calendar, should be ad 1849. Some of the pro-

272

The Small Voice of History

[Mark of Invocation]

[. . .] a dose at [. . .] and 1 made a paste of the drug again at dawn and
administered it to Chandra. That did nothing to destroy the foetus.
The next day when I went again to the same Kali Bagdi together with
my mother and Chandra, he gave us a herbal medicine which had to
be taken thrice a day ( jori tin pan) together with some horituki (a wild
fruit of medicinal value) and two tablets of bakhorguli (a preparation
of herbs and rice used to induce abortion) diluted in lime water. On
1 2 Choitra2 1 prepared a paste of the medicine with my own hands and
administered one dose of ir to Chandra at a quarter past the second
pohor s of the night. Then at about a quarter past the second prohor the
foetus was destroyed and it fell to the ground. My mother picked up
the bloody foetus with some straw and threw it away. Even after that
the pain in Chandra’s belly continued to increase and she died when
it was still 4 or 5 dondoes4 left of the night. Chandra’s corpse was then
buried near the [river s] bend by my brother Gayaram, his brother-in-
law and my mothers brother Horilal. I administered the medicine in
the belief that it would terminate her pregnancy and did not realize
that it would kill her. — End of statement.

When the other defendants were arrested on the basis of this de-
position, Bhagaboti Chashin, mother of the deceased Chandra, also
got a deposition written for her on the same lines as Brindras, and
alleged further:

per names in the document appear in several variations: the surname Chashani
as Chashini and Chashin, and the prenoms Brinda as Brindra, Rongo as Rongu,
Kali as Kalicharan. These variations have been retained in the translation.

2 Choitra is the twelfth month of the Bengali year and corresponds roughly
to the second half of March and the first half of April.

3 Pohor and its variation, prohor , are a measure of time roughly equal to an
eighth part of a twenty-four hour day. ‘A quarter past the second pohor of the
night’ may therefore be taken to correspond approximately to three-quarters of
an hour past midnight.

4 Dondo is a measure of time equivalent roughly to 24 minutes, so that the
expression ‘4 or 5 dondoes left of the night’ may be taken to mean an hour and
a half to two hours before dawn, and the expression second dondo of the day
a little less than an hour after sunrise.

Chandras Death

273

Towards the end of last Phalgun,5 6 Magaram Chasha came to my village
and said, ‘I have been involved, for the last four or five months, in an
illicit love affair (ashnai) with your daughter Chandra Chashani, as a
result of which she has conceived. Bring her to your own house and
arrange for some medicine to be administered to her. Or else, I shall
put her into bhek* Two days after that I sent my daughter Brindra and
my sister’s daughter Rongo Chashani to Bhabanipur to fetch Chandra.
The same day they returned to Majgram with Chandra Chashani at
about a prohor after nightfall, and Rongu said that Chandras mother-
in-law Srimoti and her husband s sister’s husband Magaram Chasha
had given them a brass pot and a bell-metal bowl [in order to pay] for
the arrangements to procure the drug required for an abortion. — End
of statement.

And Kalicharan Bagdi, defendant, said in his deposition:

It was still some five or seven days to go before the end of the month
of Phalgun in the current year when I was at my vegetable plot on the
bank of the river one day. Rongu Chashani approached me there at
approximately the second dondo of the day and said, ‘Please call at my
house. When you do so, I shall tell you all I have to say.’ The following
day I went to the house of Bongshi Bagdi of Majgram but failing to
meet Rongu Chashani there I was going back home when I happen-
ed to meet Bhagaboti Chashani who said, ‘My daughter Chandra
Chashini is in the third month of her pregnancy. Please let us have a
drug to terminate that pregnancy and we shall give you a pot and a
bowl/ I didn’t agree [to her request]. The following day I was at my
vegetable plot when at one and a half dondo of the day the said Bhaga-
boti Chashin came to me with an elderly peasant of the village Simla.
He is Bhagaboti s son’s father-in-law, but I don’t know his name.
Bhagaboti said, ‘Please give us a medicine to destroy the foetus. We
shall pay for it in cash, if required.* Since I didn’t have the drug
for abortion with me that day, I told Bhagaboti, ‘Please meet me here
at this vegetable plot tomorrow and collect the medicine; your son’s
father-in-law need not take the trouble to call again.’ The next day I
was at my vegetable plot. When the said Bhagaboti came to me at noon

5 Phalgun is the eleventh month of the Bengali year and corresponds roughly

to the second half of February and the first half of March.

6 The habit of a person belonging to the Boishnob sect.

274

The Small Voice of History

with her daughter Chandra Chashini and I asked for the price of the
medicine on the understanding that Bhagaboti s sons father-in-law
would pay it in cash, as promised the previous day, the deceased
Chandra offered me one paisa (a copper coin valued at one sixty-fourth
part of a rupee). I accepted that paisa, and after asking them to take
their seat at the vegetable plot . . . [ad 1 849]

How is one to reclaim this document for history? The ordinary
apparatus of historiography has little help to offer us here. Designed
for big events and institutions, it is most at ease when made to operate
on those larger phenomena which visibly stick out of the debris of the
past. As a result, historical scholarship has developed, through recursive
practice, a tradition that tends to ignore the small drama and fine detail
of social existence, especially at its lower depths. A critical historiography
can make up for this lacuna by bending closer to the ground in order
to pick up the traces of a subaltern life in its passage through time.

However, that is no easy task, as is made so painfully obvious by the
material before us. The difficulty does not arise from its want of
authenticity. On the contrary, both the prose and the presentation of
the document speak of it as a genuine testimony to the event described.
Written in rustic Bengali (some of which has inevitably lost its flavour
in translation), it abounds in spelling errors. Characteristically, too, it
has no punctuation and paragraphing (like those introduced by us in
the English rendering). It begins with a mark of invocation which
combines the customary sign anji (resembling the Bengali numeral
seven, capped by a crescent) and the honorific word ‘Sree\ duplicated
for effect with the name of the deity, Hori. All this, taken together with
an awkward mixture of country idiom and Persianized phrases borrowed
from the language of the courts, speaks unmistakably of this writing
as the work of a village scribe drafted in the service of the local law-
enforcing agents. As such, it is witness to the force of the disciplinary
thrust made by the colonial regime into Indian rural society by the
middle of the nineteenth century.

But with all its authenticity this document still fails to satisfy an
important condition required by the normal practice of historiography.
It is the condition of contextuality. For unless his material relates to a

Chandra's Death

275

context, it is difficult for the historian to know what to do with it. This
is particularly true of narrative material which makes sense only if it
connects with what goes before and comes after it. That is why an urge
for plenitude constitutes the driving force behind much of historical
research — an insatiated, indeed insatiable, urge for more and more
linkages to work into the torn fabric of the past and restore it to an ideal
called the full story. It is therefore frustrating for that urge to come up
against the phenomenon of fragmentation — that maverick which
breaks into Clios estate from time to time, stalls a plot in its drive to
a denouement, and scatters its parts. Our specimen is one such
untamed fragment, as the lost beginning of its first sentence and the
missing end of the last so clearly testify. An anecdote with no known
context, it has come down to us simply as the residuum of a dismem-
bered past.

It would have helped if we could find a way of neutralizing the
effects of decontextualization by situating this fragment in a series.
For the principles according to which a series is constructed and the
character of the constructing authority are all relevant to ones under-
standing of what is serialized. Historians know all too well how the
contents of a series in an official archive or a company’s record room
derive much of their meaning from the intentions and interests of the
government or the firm concerned. The material under study also
belongs to a series — an editorially constructed series in a book of
documents. But this has, alas, been designed with such scant regard for
the contiguities of time and place, and its contents have been arranged
under rubrics so excessively broad in scope, that serialization, in this
particular case, is of no assistance at all in our search, for a context.

That search is made all the more difficult by the mediation of the
law. Each of the statements in this document is direct speech, but it is
speech prompted by the requirements of an official investigation into
what is presumed to be a murder. ‘Murder is the point at which history
intersects with crime’, says Foucault, and the site of that intersec-
tion is, according to him, the narrative of crime {rtcitde crime) 7 The
discourse of the broadsheet where this genre is represented in its most
popular and accessible form has it as its function ‘to change the scale,

7 This and the other extracts quoted in this paragraph are taken from Michel
Foucault, Moiy Pierre Riviere, ayant igorgi ma mbre> ma soeur et mon frbre (Paris:

276

The Small Voice of History

enlarge the proportions, make the minuscule grain of history visible
and open up for the quotidian its access to the narrative.' It is indeed
in this way that such narratives are able to ‘play a role in the exchange
between the familiar and the remarkable, between the quotidian and
the historic.' The common murder, trivialized by the tolerance all
cultures have of cruelty, uses precisely this discourse as its vehicle to
cross the uncertain frontier which separates it from the nameless
butcheries’ of a battle and make its way into history — a history
without masters, a history crowded with frantic and autonomous
events, a history below the level of power and one which fell foul of
the law.’

If the discourse of the broadsheet helps to open a path for crime
to enter history, it is the function of judicial discourse as a genre to
cut off that path by trapping crime in its specificity, by reducing its
range of signification to a set of narrowly defined legalities, and by
assimilating it to the existing order as one of its negative determinations.
The ekrars (a legal term for confessions or acknowledgements of guilt)
which make up our text are witness precisely to such a process of de-
taching an experience from its living context and setting it up as an
empty positivity outside history. It is a process intended to take out of
these statements all that stands for empathy and pity and leave nothing
to show for their content except the dry bones of a deixis — the ‘then
and ‘there’ of a crime’.

How this process is put in operation by the discursive strategy of
the law, how the latter gives the event a name and stamps it with a
purpose, is shown by the order of the ekrars. In an-all-too obvious
sense this corresponds to the punitive procedure of an initial deposition
leading to arrests followed by other depositions. The authorial voice
of the law interjects between the first two statements in our text to say
so: ‘When the other defendants were arrested on the basis of this
[Brinda’s] deposition, Bhagaboti Chashin, mother of the deceased
Chandra, also got a deposition written for her on the same lines as

1973), pp. 269-71. My translation of these extracts is intended to be more
faithful to the original than that of the English edition of this work published,
as /, Pierre Rivitre . . . (Harmondsworth: 1978), pp. 204-6.

Chandra's Death

277

Brindras and alleged further . . However, whar is not so straight-
forward is the disparity between the actual sequence of events and its
representation in the document. It emerges clearly from the information
we have that the initiatives taken by Bhagaboti on hearing about her
daughter s pregnancy and the transaction with Kali Bagdi preceded the
administration of the drug by Brinda and her sister s death. Yet, in the
order of the depositions Brinda had to speak first. Consequently, the
‘telling began in medias res with an account of her part in the story
and Chandra’s death, and retraced its steps analeptically to fill in the
background by two other accounts — Bhagaboti s and Kali s. In other
words, the narrative in the document violates the actual sequence of
what happened in order to conform to the logic of a legal intervention
which made the death into a murder, a caring sister into a murderess,
all the actants in this tragedy into defendants, and what they said in a
state of grief into ekrars. Construed thus, a matrix of real historical
experience was transformed into a matrix of abstract legality, so that
the will of the state could be made to penetrate, reorganize part by part,
and eventually control the will of a subject population in much the
same way as Providence is brought to impose itself upon mere human
destiny.

The outcome of this hypostasis is to assimilate the order of the
depositions before us to another order, namely law and order, to select
only one of all the possible relations that their content has to their
expression and designate that relation — that particular connotation —
as the truth of an event already classified as crime. It is that privileged
connotation which kneads the plurality of these utterances recorded
from concerned individuals — from a mother, a sister, and a neighbour —
into a set of judicial evidence, and allows thereby the stentorian voice
of the state to subsume the humble peasant voices which speak here
in sobs and whispers. To try and register the latter is to defy the
pretensions of an abstract univocality which insists on naming this
many-sided and complex tissue of human predicament as a case. For,
to take that word to mean, as it usually does, an instance of a things
occurring’ or a ‘statement of facts in cause sub judice * is to confer on
these statements the function of describing this death merely as a

1 The Concise Oxford Dictionary , 6th edition (Oxford: 1976), p. 152.

278 The Small Voice of History

thing’s occurring, as a fact shorn of all other determinations than being
subjudice. It was as if there was no room in such description for a will
or purpose and all that was said was meant to speak of an event without
a subject. The particular will of the criminal’ is, according to Hegel,
‘the sole positive existence which the injury possesses.’9 To assume
criminality and yet to exclude that ‘particular will’ of the so-called
criminal and substitute the empty factuality of a ‘mere state of affairs’
for ‘the sole positive existence’ of Chandra’s ‘injury’ in one’s reading
of these ekrars would be to keep their authors and their experience out
of history. By contrast, to read these statements as an archive is to
dignify them as the textual site for a struggle to reclaim for history an
experience buried in a forgotten crevice of our past.

That struggle is nothing less than a contest between two kinds of
politics. Each of these has it as its aim to try and appropriate the event
of Chandra’s death as a discursive site — on behalf of the state in one
case and on behalf of the community in the other. However, the fact
is that the law, as the state’s emissary, had already arrived at the site
before the historian and claimed it as its own by designating the event
as a ‘case’, the death as a ‘crime’, and the utterances which describe it
as ‘ekrar’. The consequence of this appropriation has been to clip those
perspectives which situated this incident within the life of a community
where a multitude of anxieties and interventions endowed it with its
real historical content. Some of those perspectives could perhaps
be restored if the stratagem of assimilating these statements to the
processes of the law were opposed by a reading that acknowledged
them as the record of a Bagdi family’s effort to cope collectively, if un-
successfully, with a crisis.

9 Hegel's Philosophy of Rights translated with notes by T.M. Knox (Oxford:
1967), para. 99, p. 69. Knox’s comment on this passage is relevant to my
argument: ‘Crime exists as a fact, an event, and it is “positive” to that extent*,
he writes, ‘but as an event it is not differentiated by any criminal character from
other events such as accidents. As a crime it exists only for those who understand
it from the inside, i.e. as a purposeful action, and so considered, it lacks the posi-
tivity of a mere event; it is made something genuinely positive, crime and not
an accident, by the presence in it of the criminal’s will, and in this sense it is
“positive” only because it carries out his conscious purpose.* Ibid., p. 331.

Chandra's Death

279

III

The Bagdis belonged to that nether end of the colonial society
where extreme poverty and abject pollution converged to make them
amongst the lowest in class and caste. One authoritative description in
official literature placed them beyond the pale of the dominant caste
Hindu society (‘dwellers on the outskirts of Hinduism)’, 10 and another
outside history itself (‘lower Sudra people whose history in the
majority of the cases is lost’) . 1 1 In Birbhum , a western district of Bengal
where this particular family and their kin lived in a cluster of villages
at the northernmost part of the area under Dubrajpur thana,12 they
were obviously agriculturists by occupation, as the male and female
surnames chasha and chashani ( chashini and chashin being varia-
tions of the latter) indicate. They could thus be said to belong to the
category of ‘cultivating caste’ assigned to them by Risley in his ethno-
graphic glossary.13 But considered in the light of their actual function
and standing in the local society, that designation must be understood
as an euphemism for a rural proletariat. For even until fifteen years
before the end of the Raj the Bagdis could be described, together with
the other subaltern communities of that district, as ‘in the main . . .
agricultural labourers’ who providefd] the entire scries of services for
agriculture.’14 A survey made at that time of three thanas, including
Dubrajpur, showed what a ‘disproportionately small percentage of
interests* they held ‘in the real landed property of the district’. 1 5 While
the Brahmans who constituted only 6.48 per cent of the population
owned 72.25 per cent of all the land as proprietors, the Bagdis — 9. 13
per cent of the population — owned no land at all. Again, while the

10 H.H. Risley, The Tribes and Castes of Bengal, Vol. /(rpnt, Calcutta: 1981),
p. 43.

1 1 Governmen t of Bengal , Final Report on the Survey and Settlement Operations
in the District of Birbhum, 1924-1932 (Calcutta: 1937), p. 17. All further refe-
rences to this work will be to Final Report.

12 See footnote 24 below for further details of this identification.

13 Risley, Tribes and Castes, p. 37.

14 Final Report , p. 1 5.

15 Ibid., p. 15.

280

The Small Voice of History

Brahmans held 56.73 per cent of the land as tenure-holders and 1 5.08
per cent as raiyats, the Bagdis’ share was 0.24 and 2.37 per cent res-
pectively. The proportions are reversed, significantly enough, in the
case of land held as under-raiyats: 4.85 per cent by Brahmans and 9.15
by Bagdis.16 Nothing could speak more eloquently of the unequal
distribution of resources between the purest and richest at one end of
the social spectrum and the impurest and poorest at the other during
the 1930s. In this respect the progress of British rule over a period of
fifty years appears to have done little to change the condition of the
Bagdis. For, as Risley observed on the basis of the 1881 Census:

Most of the Bagdis are also to some extent engaged in agriculture, usu-
ally as kurfa or under-raiyats, and comparatively few have attained the
more respectable position of occupancy tenants. In Western Bengal we
find large numbers of them working as landless day-labourers, paid in
cash or kind, or as nomadic cultivators, tilling other mens lands on
the bhag-jot system, under which they are remunerated by a definite
share of the produce — sometimes one-half, sometimes less, as may be
arranged with their immediate landlord. I can recall no instance of a
Bagdi holding a zemindari, or even a superior tenure, such as patni or
mukarari , of any importance . . .17

Thus, as a labour force the Bagdis constituted a fertilizing sedi-
ment at the base of Bengal s agrarian economy, while being despised at
the same time as a filthy deposit at the very bottom of its rural society.
The comprehensive exploitation — economic and cultural — to which
they were thus subjected robbed them of their prestige as well. As
peasants they produced the wealth on the land by hard work, and as
lathials and nightwatchmen guarded it for their landlord masters;
and yet they were stereotyped by the latter as incorrigibly prone to
criminality. Again, it was the dominance of the upper-caste landed
elite over this community which made Bagdi women a prey to

16 This statistical information is derived from ‘Comparative Statement:
showing the interests in land of certain Castes in Thanas Sun, Khayrasol and
Dubrajpur in the District of Birbhum’, ibid., p. 71 .

17 Risley, Tribes and Castes , p. 42.

Chandra's Death

281

male lust; and yet they figured in patriarchal lore as creatures of easy
virtue all too ready to make themselves available as objects of sexual
gratification. For a measure of such hypocrisy, in which an indigenous
feudal ideology blends with colonialist anthropology, one has simply
to notice how the Brahman ical fantasy of the lascivious Bagdini, who
tempts the god Siva himself in Rameshwar Bhattacharya’s Sivayan
(especially in the Bagdini Pala of that ballad),18 converges on the
learned insinuations in Risley’s Tribes and Castes about ‘the lax views
of the Bagdis ... on the subject of sexual morality* — as was supposed
to have been demonstrated by their willingness to ‘allow their women
to live openly with men of other castes* and their tolerance of ‘sexual
license before marriage* among their girls.19

The pressures exerted by such patriarchal morality could strain the
resources of an entire community of Bagdis to breaking point. That
is what seems to have happened in the instance given in our text.
The unfortunate family at the centre of this crisis was headed at this
time by Bhagaboti Chashani, a widow. (The document makes no
mention of any male member of the family other than a son, and all
the crucial decisions bearing, literally, on matters of life and death,
seem to have been left to Bhagaboti herself — a most unlikely thing to
happen if a patriarch, in the person of a spouse, were around.) She had
three children, including a daughter called Chandra. It was Chandra’s
pregnancy and the efforts to terminate it which involved the rest of the
family and their kin in the developments that followed. Brinda, the
other daughter, is the only female for whom no reference is made to any
relatives by marriage. Since this omission occurs in the context of a
total mobilization of the kin group, it can only mean that she was a
single girl still living with her mother. There was nothing unusual
about this, for in the nineteenth century the Bagdis of West Bengal
were known to ‘practise both infant and adult marriage indiffer-
ently.*20 Brinda was obviously grown-up enough to walk all the way to
her sister s village and back within a day and be entrusted to administer

18 Siva-Samkritan va Sivayan , edited by Jogilal Haidar (Calcutta: Calcutta
University, 1957), pp. 225-77.

19 Risley, Tribes and Castes , pp. 39, 41 .

20 Ibid., p, 39.

282

The Small Voice of History

the drug to the latter and generally to look after her — a chore that
would be customarily assigned, under similar circumstances, to any
unmarried daughter in a traditional Bengali household.

Gayaram, the widow’s son, helped in a different way. Being married,
he mobilized the assistance of his wife’s family. His brother-in-law
Pitambar is mentioned in Brindas ekrar as one of the three men — the
others being Gayaram himself and his uncle, Bhagabotis brother
Horilal — who removed the corpse and buried it. Yet another member
of Pitambar s family was his father, the elderly chashi of Simla whose
presence was what apparently persuaded Kalicharan Bagdi to sell the
drug for abortion. This is an important detail which illuminates both
the cohesion of a kinship network and the weight of male authority
within it. The widows word was not enough for Kalicharan; she had
to be sponsored by a man whose standing, in terms of seniority, was
the same as that of her late husband. In other words, the lacuna of male
authority within the widow’s own family had to be made up by that
borrowed from another family allied to it by marriage.

Chandra's Kin

Unnamed Old Man A Horilal A = Bhagaboti O Srimori O = A

(5) (M) j (B) I

A Pitambar O = Gayaram O Brinda Chandra = A O = Magaram O Rongu
(5) (AO (AO (B, M) ( B) (M)

A Deceased Male B Bhabanipur M Majgram $ Simla

Alliance by marriage brought help from other quarters as well.
There was Rongu, the widows sisters daughter, who, judging by her
own statement and Kalicharan’s, was a member of Bongshi Bagdi s
household, a clear indication of her status as a married woman. How-
ever, there is no way to find out if Bongshi was her husband or father-
in-law. Whatever the relationship, he has no role assigned to him in the
document. By contrast, Rongu figures prominently as an escort for the

Chandra’s Death

283

pregnant woman on her way back to her parental home and as one of
the party which negotiated the drug. Help also came from kinsfolk
closest to Chandra by her marriage — from her mother-in-law, Srimoti,
and her husbands sisters husband, Magaram. Together, they contri-
buted a brass pot and a bell-metal bowl to pay for the abortion. But
whether Magaram s contribution qualifies as help is another matter —
a moot point of this affair, as we shall presently see.

The pot and the bowl, as the text tells us, were obviously not pay-
ment enough for the drug. The herbalist would not sell it except for
cash. In rural Bengal under the Raj it was customary for such house-
hold utensils, usually regarded by a poor family as amongst its most
valuable possessions, to be exchanged for goods and services or hypo-
thecated for small loans.21 Kalicharans refusal to accept this mode of
payment and his insistence on cash might have had something to do
with the seasonal scarcity that generally hits the countryside towards
the end of the Bengali calendar year. At this time, in Choitra (March-
April), the village poor would have exhausted whatever savings in grain
and cash they had made out of the winter rice harvest. Left with
nothing after paying for some of thei r debts and those social obligations
which occurred in this season, they would be busy soliciting loans
again in money and grain in order to answer the landlords’ and
the superior tenants’ call to clear all arrears of rent by punyaha — the
ceremonial settlement of accounts due early the following month — as
well as to stock up grain for sowing in monsoon and for consumption
during the lean period until the next harvest. In Birbhum, as in all of
the western Bengal tract known as rarh , this is the season of heat and
drought when, traditionally, starvation combines with creditors
and rentiers to start the village poor again on their annual circuit of
hypothecation of household goods against small loans of money and
grain. Phullora, the heroine of the Kalketu episode of Mukundaram

21 In Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyays Pather Panchali a bell-metal dish
changes hands from a poor Brahman woman to the village barbers wife for half
a rupee. The time of that story is the early decades of this century, but the
practice has apparently continued well into the post-colonial period. See
Bibhutirachanabaliy Vol 1 (rpnt, Calcutta: Bengali Year 1386), pp. 145-6, and
N.K. Chandra, Agricultural Workers in Burdwan*, in R. Guha (ed.), Subaltern
Studies II (Delhi: 1983), pp. 243, 247.

284

The Small Voice of History

Chakrabarty s Chandimangal, spoke for all the indigent and low-born
people of that region in her lament:

anol shoman porey choiter khara
chalusherey bandha dinu matia pathora ?2

(The drought of Choitra scorched like fire/ 1 pledged my earthenware
bowl just for a seer of rice.)

That was in the sixteenth century. Two hundred and seventy years
later, under colonial rule, the rigour of the season still drove the peasant
to go begging for rice, but with a difference: what had to be pledged
now was not earthenware but metalware. And yet, as bell-metal and
brass objects piled up with the creditor, the amount of grain lent per
unit of weight in metal would decrease. By contrast, the seasonal
scarcity of cash increased preference for the latter in ordinary trans-
actions. At such a time of the year, during the first fortnight of Choitra,
Kalicharan Bagdi was astute enough to insist on payment in cash for
his services, which were as highly specialized as they were urgently in
demand. A poor peasant, forced by the drought to withdraw from
paddy culture and left to fill in his day tending a patch of vegetables,
he knew the price of his skill, as is evident from his ekrar: ‘When the
said Bhagaboti came to me at noon with her daughter Chandra
Chashini and I asked for the price of rhe medicine on the understanding
that Bhagaboti s sons father-in-law would pay for it in cash, as pro-
mised the previous day, the deceased Chandra offered me one paisa. I
accepted that paisa . . .’ One paisa! Not a great deal to ask for an ex-
pertise as valuable as his, or for a drug meant to deal with a matter of
life and death. But by insisting on that particular mode of remuneration,
Kalicharan, though a Bagdi by caste, put himself on a cash nexus
clearly distinguished from the network of relations based on consan-
guinity and marriage. And this transaction — the intrusion of money
into a tissue of anxieties shared by kinsfolk — helps considerably
to undermine the abstract legalism of the text and heighten its drama
by a play between the contrasting elements of venality and solidarity.

22 Kavikamkan-Chandi, Part I, edited by Srikumar Bandyopadhyay and
Biswapati Chowdhury (Calcutta: Calcutta University, 1958), p. 262.

Chandra's Death

285

The solidarity inspired by this crisis had its territorial base in a clus-
ter of villages in the south-western corner of Birbhum — within and
around the Dubrajpur thana area. The document does not mention
where Horilal came from. But we know for certain that his sister,
Bhagaboti, and a niece, Rongu, were both married to Majgram men.
Bhagaboti s own children, however, had to find their spouses elsewhere:
the son, Gayaram, in Simla, and Chandra, the daughter, in Bhabanipur.
The household to which the latter belonged was headed at this time by
her mother-in-law, Srimoti, presumably a widow (there is no mention
of her husband), whose daughter was married to Magaram of the same
village. Bagdi marriage rules, which insisted on partners being selected
from two different sections within the same subcaste,23 appear thus to
have resulted, in this particular case, in a web of alliances covering three
villages. At least two of these, Majgram and Bhabanipur, were situated,
as the map shows, within about six miles of each other — indeed, an
easy walking distance: for, said Bhagaboti in her ekrar, one day in the
month of Phalgun she had sent Brinda and Rongu to Bhabanipur to
fetch Chandra and they returned to Majgram the same evening. Simla,
the other village, was about two miles to the south of Majgram — not
too far for an old peasant like Gayarams father-in-law to walk on an
occasion so urgent as this, but a little too much, perhaps, to cover on
two consecutive days. Taken together, these villages formed a kinship
region for six Bagdi families, all of whom felt seriously threatened by
Chandra’s pregnancy.24

23 ‘A Bagdi cannot marry outside the sub-caste, nor inside the section to
which he belongs. Thus a Tentulia must mary a Tenrulia, but a man of the
Salrishi section, to whatever sub-caste he may belong, cannot marry a woman
of that section.’ Risley, Tribes and Castes , p. 38.

24 My identification of these villages is based on Alphabetical List ofVillages,
West Bengal, edited by P.C. Banerjee (unpublished typescript, Office of the
Superintendant of Census Operations, Government of West Bengal, Calcutta
1956), and Final Report , appendix VII part II (map) and index to appendix VII
part II (Village List). Majgram has been identified with the only village of that
name (though spelt ‘Majhgram’) in the Alphabetical List. Bhabanipur could be
either of the two villages of that name, both nearly equidistant from Majgram

KHOYR asol

286

The Small Voice of History

o* trtmonnfx

Otn^vm*p#t

Map of a part of Dubrajpur thana in Birbhum district showing the villages
mentioned in the text

They felt threatened because a child born of an illicit, i.e. socially
forbidden, liaison between persons related as kin could have dire
consequences for an entire community. For, unlike Europe, where
according to Foucault the ‘deployment of sexuality* had already em-
erged as an independent apparatus of social control since the eighteenth
century and superimposed itself on the ‘deployment of alliance*,25 in
nineteenth-century India sexuality was still subsumed in alliance for
all social transactions — for marriage, kinship, and ‘transactions of
names and possessions* — and for all the theories which informed
them. The control of sexuality therefore devolved on those authorities

at about six miles to the north within Rajnagar thana in one case and to the
south within Dubrajpur thana in the other. I prefer the latter, as forming a better
cluster, if taken with the third village, Simla, in abbreviation for Simlakuri,
about two miles south of Majgiam.

25 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (London: 1978),
pp. 106-7.

Chandra's Death

287

and instruments — panchayats, prescriptions, prohibitions, etc. —
which governed the system of alliance. Speaking specifically of rural
Bengal one could say that the government of sexuality there lay within
the jurisdiction of samaj (a term in which the institutional aspects of
society and their moral and political attributes are happily collapsed).
How a local samaj constituted either by a caste or subcaste or by a
multi-caste community based on one or more villages exercised its
authority over the sexual conduct of its members can be seen from a
number of other documents collected from the same region. They too
speak of conditions in the rarh tract of western Bengal during the first
half of the nineteenth century.26Territorially as well as chronologically
they belong to a tradition of rural politics which was dramatized, for
one poignant moment, by the Majgram incident of 1849. As such,
they may be used to illuminate some of the mechanics of discipline and
punishment which are presupposed, though never explicitly mentioned,
in the ekrars on Chandra’s death.

However, unlike those ekrars, this material does not relate to official
justice. It belongs to that subcontinent of right and wrong which was
never painted red. As such, it is witness to the historic, if largely
unacknowledged, failure of the Raj to incorporate some of the most
vital issues of indigenous social conflict within its hegemonic judicature.
For each of these documents was addressed to a tribunal which
functioned independently of and parallel to the network of colonial
courts. Constituted at the village level by Brahman priests acting
individ ually or collectively, or by the leadership of a caste or subcaste,27
it operated by a system of rules defining the permitted and the
forbidden, the licit and the illicit’,28 in a manner that had little to
do with the codes and procedures of the sarkars ain and adalat .

26 PMCSy pp. 166-8, 175, 176, 179-83. The serial number of these docu-
ments— all from Birbhum and Bankura — and their dates as shown in parenthesis,
are 225 (1840), 227 (1804), 229 (1819), 240 (1823), 241 (1824), and 247
(1834).

27 For specimens of an individual constituting such a prescriptive author-
ity, see PMCS , documents no. 225 (pp. 179-80). The collective authority of a
group of six Brahmans is sought in another document — no. 227 (pp. 167-8).
In no. 229 (pp. 169-70) the petitioner addresses the leadership of his caste.

28 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, VoL /, p. 106.

288 The Small Voice of History

Those rules were an amalgam of local custom, caste convention, and
a rough-and-ready reading — more often just recollection — of the
shastras. The judgment constructed with their help came in the form
of a prescription for ritualized penalty, technically known as byabostha
(a vernacular adaptation of the Sanskrit word vyavastha ). Nothing
speaks more eloquently of the uneasy compromise of the shastric and
the customary than the rustication of that word byabosta, bebosta, or
even brobosta at the hands of village scribes, or the verdicts appended
by semi-literate Brahmans in bastardized Sanskrit to the inelegant
Bengali prose of these petitions.

But the force of a byabostha was hardly undermined by heteredoxy
of idiom or disregard of grammar. That it was sought, without ex-
ception, by self-confessed offenders was itself evidence of that force.
The latter derived directly from the authority of a samaj working
institutionally through panchayat and priesthood and ideologically
through custom and shastra in order to prevent its system of alliance
from being subverted by unauthorized sexuality. For the offence arose,
in each instance, from a liaison outside the socially approved limits of
sexual relationship, and the applicant for a prescriptive writ happened
invariably to be a relative of one of the partners in that liaison. To ask
for a byabostha under such circumstances was therefore to incriminate
oneself deliberately and court the certainty of punishment by prayash -
chitta or penitential measures made up of fines, fasting, and feasting.
But willing submission to such discipline was a pre-emptive tactic on
the petitioners part to ward off the ultimate social sanction of out-
casting, the terror of which is conveyed accurately by the Bengali word
for that practice — jatmara , literally, the destruction of caste. In short,
it was fear rather than choice that induced people to seek byabostha
and submit to prayashchitta.

The nature and extent of that fear can perhaps be best understood
by considering a petitioners relationship to the transgressor. In each
of these documents a villager named the transgressor as a relative —
indeed as a consanguine in all instances but one (where it concerned
a brothers wife).29 In every instance, again, the relative was a woman
and referred to as ‘ My daughter, <My sister, or 4 My sister-in-law.’

29 PMCS , no. 240, p. 175.

Chandra’s Death

289

The paucity of male offenders in our sample is a telling index of patri-
archal concern to exercise greater control over female than male
sexuality. For the response of a samaj to sexual deviance was not the
same for both genders. Since the prestige of a caste was higher or lower
according to the degree of its purity — and the physical constitution of
women as well as their cultural construction as objects of male lust
made them, in mens eyes, potentially the more polluting of the two
sexes — a maidens virginity, a widows chastity, and a wife’s sexual
fidelity to her husband were all highly valorized by a samaj. Any
violation of norms in this respect could pollute all of an offender s kin,
especially her consanguines, and undermine the groups ability to
sustain and reproduce itself by recruiting and exchanging women
through marriage. As a result, the first whispers of a gossip ( janorob ) —
most of the petitions testify to its power — alerted an entire kinship
network, and a father, brother, or husband would presume, willy-nilly,
a womans guilt without any further evidence, apply for a byabostha,
and make peace with priests and panchayats by submitting to whatever
penalty was imposed by them. These impositions could be oppressive
for some of the less affluent villagers: one of them asked for a writ and
protested his poverty ( iha ati daridra) at the same time in a desperate
attempt to persuade the tribunal — in this case his caste council — to
limit the price of exculpation to a sum he could afford.30 It was a
measure of their fear of exclusion from caste that people put up with
the tyranny of such prescriptions and their disciplinary jurisdictions.

That fear was the reciprocal of solidarity under these circumstances.
The two must be taken together for any proper understanding of a
community’s reaction to the kind of crisis that irrupted on the Bagdis
of Majgram. For the object of solidarity was also the person who could,
by her transgressions, bring shame upon those she would most expect
to stand by her when found guilty and share the rigour of all the
penalties prescribed by her samaj . Consequently, the limits of solidarity
within a kin group coincided with those of its members’ dread of caste
sanctions, and the terms used by ego to call for help would evoke a sym-
pathetic but apprehensive response in reciprocal terms from the rest of
the group. Thus, between siblings, a sister’s cry in her distress would

30 Ibid., no. 229, pp. 169-70.

290 The Small Voice of History

be addressed to her brother and his answer inspired as much by his
sense of obligation owing to a sister as by the fear of his own culpability
accruing from any moral lapse on her part if such assistance were not
offered. In other words, the reciprocals that made up a lexicon of
kinship terminology corresponded to the reciprocities of solidarity
and fear within that particular kinship group. A correspondence of this
order can be discerned quite clearly in the mobilization of Chandra’s
relatives during the four critical days before her death. For, as shown
below those who rallied to her support as her brother, brother’s wife’s
brother, brothers wife’s father, mothers brother, and of course as
mother, sister, mother’s sister s daughter and mother-in-law were also
those who had the most to dread from caste sanctions because of the
misdemeanour of one who related to them respectively as sister, sister s
husband’s sister, sister’s daughter, daughter, sister, mother’s daughter
or daughter-in-law.

Table

Kinship Terms and their Reciprocals Designating Relatives
Who Helped Chandra (Ego)

Relatives

Names

Egos Terms
for her Kin

Reciprocal

Terms

Gayaram

brother

sister

Pitambar

brothers wife’s brother

sister’s husband s sister

Pitambar s father

brothers wile's lather

daughter's husband’s sister

Horilal

mothers brother

sisters daughter

Bliagabori

mother

daughter

Brinda

sister

Rongu

mothers sisters daughter

mothers sister's daughter

Srimoti

morher-in-law

daughrer-in-law

It is this interplay of solidarity and fear which situates this tragic
episode firmly within the politics of patriarchy in rural Bengal. For
it is the direct outcome of a patriarchal society’s concern to protect
itself from the consequences of female sexual transgression. That
concern is clearly inscribed in the series of petitions for byabostha

Chandra’s Death

291

mentioned above. In each of them it is a man who comes forward to
report a womans ‘sin (paap ), it is some other men who validate his
statement by formally witnessing it, and it is the authority of a male-
dominated samaj, personified by a pandit or institutionalized by a
panchayat, which issues the verdict of guilt and the writ for prayash-
chitta. By contrast, mans power over woman and over society as a
whole is documented in the Majgram ekrars by a formal absence — the
absence of Magaram Chashi. Although deeply implicated in all that
leads to abortion and death, he stands outside the purely legal deter-
minations of the incident. There is no ekrar taken down from him, for
he is technically beyond the ken of the law: the law does not see him —
it doesn’t have to.

Yet, unlike Chandra who too is absent and whose absence corresponds
to her silence (the only glimpse we have of her alive is when a paisa
changes hands from her to Kali, presumably in silence), he is given a
voice in the text. He speaks through Bhagaboti Chashin who quotes
him as saying: ‘I have been involved, for the last four or five months,
in an illicit love affair ( ashnai ) with your daughter Chandra Chashani,
as a result of which she has conceived. Bring her to your own house and
arrange for some medicine to be administered to her. Or else, I shall
put her into bhek .’

Three short sentences, and even these are not uttered by the speaker
himself. But that does not stop them taking hold of the document and
charging it with the speaker swill. Indeed, the reported character of the
speech helps, somewhat paradoxically, to emphasize its commanding
aspect. It resonates like the voice of an unseen but pervasive authority.
For it is Magarams will which, thanks to this reporting, is allowed to
set the scene, define its context, and determine all the action in it. The
three sentences work together to that end, as is made clear by their
modal differences. The unmarked and merely declarative first sentence
stands in sharp contrast to the markedly imperative and intentional
function of the other two. Taken together, they act as a fulcrum for all
the initiatives which follow from that utterance — the alerting of a
social network to the gravity of an unwanted pregnancy in its midst,
the mission to bring Chandra back to her own village; the quick
pooling of resources for consultation and medication; the desperation
of Brindas attempt to destroy the embryo and save her sister; the sad.

292

The Small Voice of History

furtive digging at dawn to dispose of the corpse. Magaram s voice thus
dominates the text. It does so not merely by providing a cue for its
drama but by elucidating its politics.

For, what he had to say brought out into the open an element of
power play which, though implicit in all the statements, was left to him
alone to spell out. He could do so because he was not directly involved
in the processes of the law himself: unlike the others, he was not a
‘defendant*. Indeed, his was the only voice in the text to escape
superimposition by the discourse of law and order — the only utterance
that was not an ekrar. As such, it was possible for it to speak in terms
of a power relation that was sited at a depth within the indigenous
society, well beyond the reach of the disciplinary arm of the colonial
state. There, in the unredeemed obscurity of a still active feudal
culture, female sexuality was so relentlessly and comprehensively sub-
jected to surveillance that the only relief a woman could have from the
combined rigour of a loveless marriage and domestic drudgery lay in
subterfuge and secrecy. Subterfuge enabled her to dissolve some of the
gall of interdicted desire in a socially approved discourse — that of
the joke. Indeed, the joking relationship — a genre which, in the voca-
bulary of anthropology, marries the figure of a social contradiction to
a figure of speech, i.e, the tensions of unauthorized sexuality to those
of irony — was not only allowed but positively encouraged, as wit-
ness the multitude of usages to that effect in the Bengali language.
But sexuality thar was not contained and subdued by joke could be
driven underground and flourish in the secrecy of an illicit and re-
prehensible passion.

The slide from subterfuge into secrecy was as common in Bengali
society of that time as it was commonly suppressed, although nothing
could be more difficult to document than the path such a slide actually
took in any given instance and its critical moments. For a transgres-
sion of that order, born in secrecy, survived by stratagems of secrecy.
Silence and evasion, fear and shame — all conspired to tolerate, or at
least look away from, whatever exceeded the prescribed limits of sexual
politics within a kinship group, so long as it was not forced out into
the light of day by violence or by a rupture in the mute complicity of
horizontal loyalties. We shall never know, therefore, how that eminently
permissible joking relationship between a salaj (wife’s brothers wife)

Chandra's Death

293

and her nondai (husbands sisters husband)31 — the reciprocal terms
designating Chandra and Magaram as kin — turned into an ashnai,
i.e. whether it developed out of mutual affection or some force of
circumstance subjecting a poor widow to the lust of a man of authority
among her close relatives. Whatever the truth of the beginning of
this affair, there is nothing in these depositions to illuminate any
secrets of the heart. They only throw a lurid light on its end as the
heartless rejection of a woman by the man who got her into trouble.
That rejection shows where a liaison, with all that it might have meant
as a relation of intimacy between rwo persons, stopped and social
opprobrium against forbidden love took over.

In transiting from his role of the lover to that of a custodian of
patriarchal ethics Magaram speaks for all men in a semi-feudal society
and for male dominance itself. There is nothing remotely of a lovers
sentiment in what he says, no acknowledgement at all of sharing any
sexual pleasure with his partner. What comes through is the other male
voice — not the one that croons so exquisitely about love in Bengali
lyrics- — but the disciplinary voice that identifies and indicts an offence
against public morality to pronounce: ‘Abortion or bhek!’ Or, is
it simply the same male voice speaking in one of its two distinct
but complementary idioms — an idiom of feudal love rooted firmly in
the inequality of gender relations and a penal idiom used for policing
the second sex? In any case, by pronouncing his ultimatum as he does,
Magaram Chasha transcends his particularity and emerges as the
universal male trying to make his sexual partner pay for a breach of
morality of which he is at least equally guilty. For that is precisely what
is involved in his threat to force a Boishnob s habit on Chandra as the
only alternative to abortion.

To wear a Boishnob s habit, that is, to adopt the dress, ornaments,
and body markings which make up the semiotic ensemble called
bhek, is to move out of caste. As Akshaykumar Datta wrote in his

31 1 think Ronald B. Inden and Ralph W. Nicholas a»“e a bit too restrictive in
their description of the range of joking relationships in Bengali society. The
salaj-nondai relation, together with a few others they do not mention, could be
quite legitimately added to their list. Inden and Nicholas, Kinship in Bengali
Culture (Chicago: 1977), pp. 31-2.

294 The Small Voice of History

authoritative work, Bharatbarshiya Upasak Sampraday , a near-con-
temporary of the text under discussion, ‘Those who leave their castes
and families and seek [spiritual] asylum with Lord Gouranga in their
urge for world-abdication, must take the bhek.’32 But to this sense of
a voluntary withdrawal from the institutions of Brahmanical Hinduism
in favour of a way of life inspired by Chaitanyas teachings, another
meaning accreted over time to make this word into an euphemism for
loss of caste. The result was a semantic spread which reduced, indeed
reversed, the force of choice that was there in the original idea, and
bhek came to signify loss of caste by expulsion rather than by abdi-
cation. For a conversion to the Boishnob faith was often the last refuge
of a person excommunicated by his or her samaj as punishment for
violation of caste codes. It was as a measure by which a local Hindu
society sought to defend its hierarchical and sacral structure. But such
surgical operation did not always have the desired effect. The wound
it inflicted could fester and infect the community by those very
freedoms which it was the object of the discipline to exclude in the first
place. For an outcaste could return to his or her village in bhek and
undermine the authority of the samaj by transgressions for which, as
a Boishnob, he or she was no longer answerable to the guardians of
Hindu morality.

An incident, mentioned in a petition of 1853, tells us how two
victims of caste oppression in Nabosta (within the Nanoor thana of
Birbhum) turned the tables on their persecutors in precisely this way.

32 The ritual of bhek is described in this work (edited by Benoy Ghose [Cal-
cutta: 1970], p. 105) thus: ‘[Sect leaders called Goswamis usually rely on theii
assistants called] Foujdars and Chhoridars for this ceremony. The latter would
get an acolyte to go through the ritual of head-shaving and bathing, confer on
him a stylized knot on a waist-band (dor) , a loin-cloth (kopin) , an outer garment
(bohirbas), a characteristic mark of the sect on his forehead (tilak), a lesson in
ritual gestures ( mudra ) as well as a water pot (koronga; ghoti ), a necklace for
telling beads (japomald ) and a three-stringed necklace for wearing (trikonthika
galomala).They would then instruct him in a mantra . They charge a minimum
fee of one and a quarter rupee for all this. Moreovei, offerings of food (bhog)
have to be addressed to Lords Advaita, Nityananda and Chaitanya on this occa-
sion and Boishnobs fed in a large banquet. It is popularly believed that the insti-
tution of bhek (i bhekasram ) was created by Lord Nityananda.’

Chandra's Death

295

There a widow called Saki and a man, Ramkumar Ghose, found guilty
of a supposedly illicit liaison, were forced to leave the village when the
engine customarily used for the destruction of caste (jatmara) was
turned on and life made impossible for them by denying the right of
interdining with their kin and by cutting off the ritually indispens-
able services of priests and barbers (amara napit puruhitget mela sakole
atok koriachhi ). However, the couple got themselves initiated into
the Boishnob faith by someone called Jagomohon Fojdar in Bahmon-
khondo, a neighbouring village, and returned to Nabosta after some
time, causing much consternation among the authorities who had
organized their expulsion. For, as the latter complained, the woman
now began openly to live with her lover in the same household and
share his meals, defying thereby some of the basic rules governing
sexuality and commensality in a Hindu widow's life. She was even
‘seen to wear bangles on her arms — an emblem of marital status
strictly prohibited for a widow. Yet there was little that the village
leaders could do about such outrages in their midst, for they recognized,
to their great chagrin, that ‘Boishnobs were under no obligation [to
abide by any caste discipline]’ ( koishnoher paksho daya nai ).33

Not all who were driven thus by casteism to embrace the Boishnob
faith had the courage of this widow and her lover to stand up to the
local despots who had muscled them out of home and village. On
the contrary, most of those who were forced into bhek drifted into
akhras. These were a type of communal settlement of Boishnobs
which served not only as the principal site of their residence and ritual
activity but also as a limbo for all the dead souls of Hindu society. Here
the disenfranchized of all castes gathered into a secondary society, a
large part of which was constituted by women excommunicated
for their deviation from the approved norms of sexual conduct — a
deviation encouraged, and often imposed, by male lust and brutality.
It was, therefore, not uncommon to find a large congregation of
derelict womanhood in an akhra — victims of rape and seduction,
deserted wives, women hounded out of homes for rebelling against
marriages to which they had been committed as infants, women
persecuted by their husbands families for their parents failure to pay

33 PMCS, no. 248, pp. 180-1.

296

The Small Voice of History

up the dowries contracted for marriage, women with children born
out of wedlock, or simply women left in the lurch by their lovers. But
the largest group of female outcastes was made up, in most akhras, of
Hindu widows ostracized for defying the controls exercised on their
sexuality by the local patriarchies.

By an ironical twist, however, the asylum a woman found in an
akhra could turn out to be a transfer from one variation of patriarchal
dominance to another. This other dominance did not rely on the
ideology of Brahmanical Hinduism or the caste system for its arti-
culation. It knew how to bend the relatively liberal ideas ofVaishnavism
and its loose institutional structure for its own ends, demonstrating
thereby that for each element in a religion which responds to the sigh
of the oppressed there is another to act as an opiate. It is the opiate of
bhakti on which the engine of oppression turned in this particular case
to make of the sebadasi — literally, a woman devoted to [spiritual or
divine] service’ — an object of male exploitation for manual labour and
sexual gratification. Indeed, exploitation of this order has been esta-
blished long enough to constitute a tradition that has continued well
into our own times. It is a continuity which feeds on the tragic insti-
tution of Hindu widowhood in rural Bengal, especially among its
subaltern population. As a sympathetic and acute observer reflects on
some of his findings from a recent visit to an akhra in a West Bengal
village not far from where Chandra died:

I couldn’t help wondering where ail these *ebadasis came from? ... an
answer occurred immediately to my mind. In this wretched land there
is no dearth of widows, hence no want of sebadasis either. Is there
any scarcity of poor, dependent, childless widows in the countryside?
How they go through the ritual of adopting a guru in order to escape
from the aggressive lust of their husbands’ elder or younger brothers,
how they happen to congregate in akhras, who are the people who at-
tract them, seduce them and infect them with venereal diseases — who
is to write the social history of all that?34

34 Sudhir Chakrabarty, ‘Gobhir Nirjon Father Ulto Bankey, Baromas , 6:2
(March-April 1985). p. 4.

Chandras Death

297

Some of the local male informants spoke to this observer with
bitterness about the uses made of religion to corrupt womep. This was
a censure which had all the force and falsity of a half-truth in so far as
it correctly identified a canker at the heart of rural society, but failed
at the same time to discern its aetiology by refusing to acknowledge
the factor of male complicity in what religion did to women. Thus,
said one, ‘How many of these sebadasis you see here, are genuine
devotees? The great majority of them are flotsam. Nobody knows
where they come from. They are recruited by procurers. It is the same
story for all akhras. Corrupted themselves, it is they who would bring
other peoples wives and daughters here in the name of religion and
corrupt them as well. * Another villager described these akhras as ‘abor-
tion centres . According to him —

Parents in these rural parts sometimes bring an unmarried daughtei
to such an akhra, if she happens ro conceive, and leave her there for a
month or so. The villagers are told that the girl has been sent to serve
the family’s guru. It is only after a successful abortion that the girl
returns home. Occasionally, a girl dies [in the process]. Well, there are
men who will undertake to dig a pit in the sandbank of a river and hide
the corpse there. The police would look away. The police station is
far away. The guru sends his votive offering there at regular intervals.
Everything is in order.35

It was as a variation on this theme that Magaram Chasha had
pronounced his ultimatum: ‘Arrange for an abortion, or she must be
dumped in an akhra!’ This attempt to shirk parenthood by the des-
truction of an embryo or by consigning its carrier to living death in
an akhra earns for Magaram a place in a historical relationship of
power — a relationship of male dominance mediated by religion. It is
a relationship which is overlaid and obscured, in our text, by the law s
concern to assign criminality to one or more of the ‘defendants’ in this
‘case . But the project to reclaim this material for history calls for a
movement in the opposite direction, so that the pall of abstract
legalism is penetrated in order to identify the murderer s hand as that

35 Ibid,, pp. 4-5.

298 The Small Voice of History

of patriarchy in its dual role of the cynical lover and the authoritar-
ian samaj.

In the end, as this document shows in no uncertain terms, patriarchy
won out. Magarams ultimatum produced the desired effect. The
pregnancy was terminated. Both the foetus and the body that had
carried it for three months were put out of the way. But it was by no
means an easy victory. The solidarity born out of fear contained within
it another solidarity activated by a different, indeed contradictory,
principle — namely empathy. If it was the power of patriarchy which
brought about the first, it was the understanding of women which
inspired the second.

The ekrar taken down from Brinda is instructive in this respect.
Here she concentrates meticulously, for the most part, on the pro-
curement, preparation, and administration of the drug that killed
Chandra. This is precisely what the law wants her deposition to do. In
its eye she stands nearest to the crime as its immediate agent and is,
therefore, required to describe the process of its commission in all
detail. So we are given an account of her part, spread over four days,
in obtaining the ingredients for the drug, mixing them for medication
by the right dosage twice a night, and caring for the pregnant woman
for the next twenty-four hours until the latter ejects the foetus, bleeds
to death in extreme pain, and is buried. It is only when, at this point,
the sequence of medication, abortion, death, and burial grinds to a halt
that she exclaims: ‘I administered the medicine in the belief that it
would terminate her pregnancy and did not realize that it would kill
her.’ With these words she comes out of the metonymic trance of her
deposition and identifies herself no longer as a defendant speaking of
a crime but as a person speaking of her sister and as a woman speaking
of another woman. The recollections of that night of violence— of
Chandra’s body racked by fever and pain, of a plucked foetus, of
haemorrhage and death, of a corpse surreptitiously buried in the
darkness before dawn, and the recollection, above all, of the supreme
violence of a mans rejection of a woman impregnated by him — com-
bine to produce an utterance which defies the ruse of the law and
confers on this text the dignity of a tragic discourse.

Chandra’s Death

299

What we have here is indeed a classic instance of choice overruled
inexorably by necessity — by fate, in short. For Chandra was killed by
the very act which was meant to save her from living death in a ghetto
of social rejects. Yet here, as in all tragedies, the triumph of fate helped
to enhance rather than diminish human dignity — the dignity of
womens choice to terminate the pregnancy and their determination to
act according to it. The contradictions through which they picked
their way to arrive at that choice were a measure both of its gravity and
its complexity. They could not defy the authority of the samaj to the
extent of enabling a widow with a child born out of wedlock to live
honourably in the local society. It would be a long time yet before such
a thing could happen in rural Bengal. Historically, therefore, abortion
was the only means available for them to defeat the truly cock-eyed
morality which made the mother alone culpable for an illicit childbirth,
threw her out of society, and allowed the father to go scot-free. Under
these circumstances their decision to go ahead with the termination of
Chandra’s pregnancy acquired a content very different from what
Magaram had on his mind when he confronted her mother with that
alternative. It was for him merely a ploy to save his own face. But for
the women who had gathered around Chandra at this crisis the
destruction of the foetus was a desperate but consciously adopted stra-
tegy to prevent the social destruction of another woman, to fight for
her right to a life with honour within her own society. The decision to
which Bhagaboti, Brinda, Rongu, and Chandra herself were party
amounted thus to an act of resistance against a patriarchal tradition
that was about to claim yet another woman as its victim; and their
resistance took that characteristic form often adopted by the oppressed
to subvert the designs of their oppressors in the guise of conforming
to them.

Seen in this light the activity of women assumes a remarkable
salience in this text. Indeed, such activity is one of the most visible
aspects of an event which is otherwise so shrouded in secrecy and
shame. It is women who generate most of the movement in it. Men
have a part to play as helpers, but they do so clearly as auxiliaries: Kali
Bagdi who has to be coaxed to sell the drug; the elderly peasant from
Simla mobilized simply to add a nodding consent to Bhagabotis
decision to go ahead with the abortion; and the three male relatives

300

The Small Voice of History

who figure as undertakers. By contrast, the initiative for all that follows
Magaram’s threat lies with the women. It is they who make up the party
which travels to Bhabanipur and brings the young widow back to her
village. It is they again who clinch the deal with the herbalist, get hold
of the drug, administer it, and care for Chandra as she lies convulsed
with pain. The exclusion of men from these interventions is hardly
fortuitous. They are excluded because such interventions relate to a
domain regarded as womans own. It is the domain of the female body
where, according to Simone de Beauvoir, ‘pregnancy is above all a
drama that is acted out within the woman herself in terms of the
contradictory pulls of the immanence of her body and its transcendence:
the pregnant woman feels the immanence of her body at just the time
when it is in transcendence/36 The rhetoric and development of this
drama lie, on the one hand, in the immanence of that body as it ‘turns
upon itself in nausea and discomfort’, making the flesh feel like
nothing but a gross and present reality’, and, on the other, in the body’s
transcendence as the flesh becomes root-stock, source and blossom ... a
stirring towards the future’, when by ‘carrying [the foetus within her]
she feels herself vast as the world.’

If, therefore, in many societies like the one under discussion natal
care lies exclusively with women, this is so not simply because men
would have it that way. On the contrary, this may well be a sign of
patriarchy’s retreat in the face of womans determination to assert her
control over her own body at a time when, in pregnancy, she knows
that ‘her body is at last her own, since it exists for the child who belongs
to her.’37 This knowledge constitutes a challenge which is genuinely
dreaded by male authority. For it operates in an area of liminality not
strictly governed by the will of husbands and fathers — an area which
appears to the latter as fraught with uncertainty and danger, since
women speak here in a language not fully comprehensible to men and
conduct themselves by rituals that defy male reasoning.

Hence the elaborate structure of patriarchy’s self-defence set up
precisely to meet this challenge — the shastric injunctions which con-
demn womans body as impure by definition at childbirth; the physical

36 These and the other extracts quoted in this paragraph are taken from
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (Harmondsworth: 1984), pp. 512-13.

37 Ibid., p. 513.

Chandra’s Death

301

exclusion of that body from domestic space immediately after parturi-
tion; the quarantine imposed by prohibitions and purificatory rules to
ensure the safety of the social body from parturitive pollution, and so
on. That such prescriptions should so often be accompanied by an
equally prescriptive male chorus in praise of motherhood is quite in
order. For such idealization serves a nyofold purpose — on the one
hand, as a foil to those bans and exclusions which symptomize the fear
by which male dominance seeks to defend itself, and, on the other, as
a technique to defuse the threat which womans consciousness poses to
patriarchy at every childbirth in a traditional society.

That is why the Bagdi women of Majgram chose a far from instru-
mental role for themselves even as they pooled their resources and
wit to arrange for an abortion demanded by a man speaking for all of
the local patriarchy. As a role situated within the social domain of
childbirth it defined their independence negatively by excluding men
from all those decisions and initiatives which were vital to the termi-
nation of Chandras pregnancy. What is equally, if not more, important
is that even in their apparent complicity the women acted in accordance
with a project that was by no means identical with Magarams. The
latter had made out his ultimatum as a choice between abortion and
bhek for Chandra. Either of these would have served his own purpose,
which was to get himself off the hook and escape social sanction. Since
all he wanted was to destroy the evidence of his guilt, it could have been
achieved as well by the physical destruction of the incriminating
embryo as by the social destruction of the person who carried it.
However, for the women who had rallied in support of Chandra the
alternatives were by no means of equal value. In their judgement
abortion with all its risks was preferable to bhek. This was a choice
made by women entirely on their own in order to stop the engine
of male authority from uprooting a woman from her place in the
local society.

To explain this resistance merely in terms of the obligations of
kin and kutum is to ignore what is distinctive about it and sets it apart
from kinship solidarity. It is a fundamental condition of such solidarity
that the relation between the genders within the group, whatever its
structure, should remain cohesive and non-antagonistic. For without
such cohesion there can be no reproduction of species, hence no kin-
ship. But that relation turns antagonistic whenever a termination of

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The Small Voice of History

pregnancy is enforced by patriarchy. On such occasions man s authority
stands so clearly opposed to womans interest that no subterfuge,
theological or sociological, can hide the truth of their relationship as
one of dominance and subordination. No experience, other than that
of rape, elucidates sexual politics more forcefully for the woman.
Betrayed and bleeding, she sees a core of coercion in what she believed
was mutual consent and an absuact masculinity in the person she
thought was her lover. Simone de Beauvoir writes of the bitterness of
this disillusionment thus:

when man, the better to succeed in fulfilling his destiny as man, asks
woman to sacrifice her reproductive possibilities, he is exposing
the hypocrisy of the masculine moral code. Men universally forbid
abortion, but individually they accept it as a convenient solution of a
problem; they are able to contradict themselves with careless cynicism.
But woman feels these contradictions in her wounded flesh; she is as
a rule too timid for open revolt against masculine bad faith; she regards
herself as the victim of an injustice that makes her a criminal against
her will, and at the same time she feels soiled and humiliated. She em-
bodies in concrete and immediate form, in herself, mans fault; he
commits the fault, but gets rid of it by putting it off on her ... It is at
her first abortion that woman begins to ‘know1. For many women the
world will never be the same.38

It is this knowledge of mans bad faith which makes woman wiser
about the limits of a solidarity that pretends to be neutral to gender.
The rounded, unitary world of kinship can never be the same for her
again. ‘Soiled and humiliated1 she has recourse to an alternative
solidarity — a solidarity of women. Not an ‘open revolt’ armed with
trumpet and banner, it is still a visible and loud enough protest in a
society where initiative and voice are given to man alone. For when a
victim, however timid, comes to regard herself as an object of injustice,
she already steps into the role of a critic of the system that victimizes
her. And any action that follows from that critique contains the
elements of a practice of resistance. In rallying round Chandra at the
hour of her rejection by Magaram and the samaj he spoke for, the

38 Ibid., pp. 509-10.

Chandra's Death

303

women of Majgram transcended the limits of kinship relations. In
choosing abortion as an alternative to bhek, they defied the sentence
of living death that had been already pronounced upon Chandra. That
she lost her life as a result of this effort made by the other women to
save her is the truly tragic import of Brindas despair as she said: ‘I
administered the medicine in the belief that it would terminate her
pregnancy and did not realize that it would kill her.* That tragedy was
a measure, for its time, of the strength of womens solidarity and its
limitation.39

39 I am grateful to my colleagues of the Subaltern Studies editorial team as
well as to Ahmed Kama!, Rajyashree Pandey, and James Scott for their com-
ments on this essay.

The Small Voice of History

There are phrases in many languages, Indian as well as others,
which speak of historic events and historic deeds. These phra-
ses enjoy the status of common sense, and an understanding of
their meaning by members of the respective speech communities is
presupposed without question. However, the crust of common sense
begins to crumble as soon as one asks what precisely the adjective
‘historic’ is supposed to be doing in such expressions. Its function is
of course to assign certain events and deeds to history. But who is it that
nominates these for history in the first place? For some discrimination
is quite clearly at work here — some unspecified values and unstated
criteria — to decide why any particular event or deed should be re-
garded as historic and not others. Who decides, and according to what
values and what criteria? If these questions are pressed far enough, it
should be obvious that in most cases the nominating authority is none
other than an ideology for which the life of the state is all there is to
history. It is this ideology, henceforth to be called statism, which is
what authorizes the dominant values of the state to determine the
criteria of the historic.

That is why the common sense of history may be said generally to
be guided by a surt of statism which thematizes and evaluates the past
for it. This is a tradition which goes back to the beginnings of modern

Copyright © 1 993 Ranajit Guha. Text of a public lecture originally delivered
in Hyderabad on 11 January 1993, subsequently first published in Shahid
Amin and Dipesh Chakrabarty, eds, Subaltern Studies IX (Delhi: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1995), pp. 1-12.

305

The Small Voice of History

historical thinking in the Italian Renaissance. For the ruling elements
of the fifteenth-century city-states the study of history served as a
schooling in politics and government so indispensable to their role as
citizens and monarchs. It is entirely appropriate therefore that to
Machiavelli, the intellectual most representative of those elements,
'historical study and the study of statecraft should have been essentially
the same.’1

The ascendancy of the bourgeoisie in Europe during the next
three hundred years did little to weaken this bonding of statism and
historiography. On the contrary, it was reinforced both by absolutism
and republicanism, so that by the nineteenth century, as every schoolboy
knows, to Lord Acton politics had become the very staple of historical
scholarship. What is no less important is that by then the study of
history had become fully institutionalized in Western Europe, perhaps
more so in England than elsewhere because of the relatively greater
maturity of the English bourgeoisie.

Institutionalization under these conditions meant, first, that the
study of history developed into a sort of normal science in the Kuhn-
ian sense. It was integrated into the academic system as a fully secularized
body of knowledge with its own curricula and classrooms as well as a
profession devoted entirely to its propagation by teaching and writing.
Secondly, it now acquired a place of its own in the increasingly expanding
public space where the hegemonic process often appealed to history in
order to realize itself in the interaction between citizens and the state.
It was here, again, that the study of history found its public — a reading
public, progeny of the printing technology and avid consumers of such
of its products as catered to a new bourgeois taste for historical litera-
ture of all kinds. Thirdly, it was this literature, ranging from school
manuals to historical novels, which helped to institutionalize the writing
of history by constituting it into imaginative and discursive genres
equipped with their distinctive canons and narratologies. The institu-
tionalization of the study of history had the effect, on the whole, of
securing a stable base for statism within the academic disciplines and
promoting hegemony.

1 Lauro Martines, Power and Imagination: City-States in Renaissance Italy
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1983), pp. 268-9.

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The Small Voice of History

So it was as a highly institutionalized and statist knowledge that the
study of history was introduced by the British in nineteenth-century
India. However, in a colonial condition neither institutionalization
nor statism could be what it was in metropolitan Britain. The rela-
tionship of dominance and subordination made for some critical
difference here in both respects. Education, the principal instrument
used by the Raj to normalize’ the study of history in India, was limited
to a very small minority of the population, and correspondingly the
reading public too was small in size, as was the output of books and
periodicals. Institutionalization was therefore of little help to the rulers
in their bid for hegemony. It was, on the contrary, simply a measure of
the containment of this knowledge within the colonized elite who were
the first to benefit from Western education in our subcontinent.

Statism in Indian historiography was a gift of this education. The
intelligentsia, its purveyors within the academic field and beyond, had
been schooled in their understanding of the history of the world and
especially of modern Europe as a history of state systems. In their own
work within the liberal professions therefore they found it easy to
conform to the official interpretation of contemporary Indian history
simply as a history of the colonial state. But there was a fallacy about
this interpretation. The consent which empowered the bourgeoisie to
speak for all citizens in the hegemonic states of Europe was also the
licence used by the latter to assimilate the respective civil societies to
themselves. But no such assimilation was feasible under colonial con-
ditions where an alien power ruled over a state without citizens, where
the right of conquest rather than the consent of its subjects constituted
its charter, and where, therefore, dominance would never gain the
hegemony it coveted so much. So it made no sense to equate the colo-
nial state with India as constituted by its own civil society. The history
of the latter would always exceed that of the Raj, and consequently an
Indian historiography of India would have little use for statism.

The inadequacy of statism for a truly Indian historiography fol-
lows from its tendency to forbid any interlocution between us and our
past. It speaks to us in the commanding voice of the state which by
presuming to nominate the historic for us leaves us with no choice
about our own relation to the past. Yet the narratives which constitute
the discourse of history are dependent precisely on such choice. To

The Small Voice of History 307

choose means, in this context, to try and relate to the past by listening
to and conversing with the myriad voices in civil society. These are
small voices which are drowned in the noise of statist commands. That
is why we don’t hear them. That is also why it is up to us to make
that extra effort, develop the special skills, and above all cultivate the
disposition to hear these voices and interact with them. For they have
many stories to tell — stories which for their complexity are unequalled
by statist discourse and indeed opposed to its abstract and oversimpli-
fying modes.

Let us consider four such stories.2 Our source for them is a series of
petitions addressed to the local communities or Brahman priests in
some West Bengal villages asking for absolution from the sin of afflic-
tion. The sin, supposed to have been testified by the disease itself,
called, in each case, for such purificatory rituals as only the Brahmans
could prescribe and perform. The offence, no less spiritual than patho-
logical, was identified either by name or symptom or a combination
of both. There were two cases of leprosy and one each of asthma and
tuberculosis — all diagnosed apparently without the help of specialist
advice which, in those days during the first half of the nineteenth
century, was perhaps not easily available for the rural poor.

The afflicted were all agriculturists by caste, so far as one can tell by
the surnames. For at least one of them occupation was indexed by
illness as he traced the ravages of leprosy on his hand to being bitten
by a mouse while at work on his paddy field. Nothing could be more
secular, indeed down-to-earth, if not quite convincing as an explanation
of the disease, and yet the victim himself looked upon the latter as a
suffering caused by some unspecified spiritual offence. What is it, one
wonders, that made it necessary for a malady of the body to be under-
stood as a malfunction of the soul? For an answer, it must be recognized
in the first place that a question such as this could hardly be asked in
rural Bengal at the time. With all that had happened geopolitically by
then to consolidate British paramountcy, its organ the colonial state
was still rather limited in its penetration of Indian society even in that

2 Panchanan Mandal (ed.), Chithipatre Samajchitm , vol. 2 (Calcutta &
Santiniketanr Viswabharati, 1953), no. 249 (pp. 181-2), no. 255 (p. 185),
no. 257 (pp. 185-6), no. 258 (p. 186).

308

The Small Voice of History

region where the process of colonization had gone the farthest. Insofar
as that penetration was a measure of the hegemonic claims of the
Raj, the latter were, on this evidence, unrealized in some important
respects.

The first of these claims relate to questions of health and medicine.
The colonial rulers are said to have won the minds of the natives every-
where by helping them to improve their bodies. This is a commonplace
of imperialist discourse meant to elevate European expansion to the
level of a global altruism. The control of disease by medicine and
the sustenance of health by hygiene were, according to it, the two
great achievements of a moral campaign initiated by the colonizers en-
tirely for the benefit of the colonized. But morality was also a measure
of the benefactor s superiority, and these achievements were flaunted
as the triumph of science and culture. It was a triumph of Western
civilization symbolized for the simple-minded peoples of Asia, Africa,
and Australasia touchingly by soap.

The soap and the Bible were the twin engines of Europe s cultural
conquest. For historical reasons specific to the Raj the soap prevailed
over the Bible in our subcontinent, and medicine and public health
figured more and more prominently on the record of England s Work
in India during the last decades of the nineteenth century. That was a
record in which the statement of good deeds served as an announcement
of hegemonic intentions as well. Its aim, amongst other things, was to
make foreign rule tolerable for the subject population, and science had
a part to play in that strategy. Science — the science of war and the
science of exploration — had won for Europe its first overseas empires
in the mercantile era. Now in the nineteenth century it was for science
again to establish a second-order empire by subjugating the bodies of
the colonized to the disciplines of medicine and hygiene.

The small voices of the sick in rural India speak of a degree of resist-
ance to that imperial design. They demonstrate how difficult it still was
for medicine to rely on that objectification of the body so essential for
its success in diagnosis and healing. Although it had already been
institutionalized during this period by a medical college and a number
of hospitals set up in Calcutta, the clinical gaze had not beamed on to
the neighbouring districts yet. Symptomatology would continue to

309

The Small Voice of History

inform pathology there for some time to come and no secular under-
standing of disease, however necessary, would suffice unless backed by
transcendental explanation.

The latter is where science met tradition in a cultural contest. Its
outcome was to remain undecided so long as the afflicted turned for
help to the law of faith rather than the law of reason in the conviction
that the body was merely a register for the gods to inscribe their verdicts
against sinners. What our petitioners sought therefore was moral
prescriptions for absolution rather than medical ones for cure, and
the authority they turned to was not doctors but priests. They were
persuaded to do so no less by their individual judgement than by the
counsel of their respective communities. The petitions were all witnessed
by signatories from the same or neighbouring villages, and in three out
of four by those from the same caste. In fact, the petitioners were not
necessarily the diseased themselves, but a kinsman in one instance and
a number of fellow villagers in another.3 Absolution was for them as
important as cure. Hence the sense of urgency about ritual expiation
( prayashchitta ). The latter was doubly efficacious. Its function was
to absolve not only a particular offender from the polluting effect
of his sin, but also others who had incurred impurity by associa-
tion (samsarga). Since certain kinds of diseases, such as leprosy, were
thought to be highly polluting, the need for ritual purification was
always a communal concern.

That concern has much to tell us about the history of power. At one
level, it is evidence of the limitations of colonialism — that is, of the
resistance its science, its medicine, its civilizing institutions, and
administrative policies — in short, its reason — encountered in rural
India even as late as the 1 850s. That is a level quite accessible to statist
discourse: it is never happier than when its globalizing and unifying
tendency is allowed to duel with the question of power in gross terms.
It is a level of abstraction where all the many stories these petitions have
to tell are assimilated to the story of the Raj . The effect of such lumping

3 The five petitioners in the case of tuberculosis are all from the sick man s
own village, Singarpur (op. cit., no. 255), while the petitioner in the other case
describes the patient as his mother-in-law (ibid., no. 257).

310

The Small Voice of History

is to oversimplify the contradictions of power by reducing them to an
arbitrary singularity — the so-called principal contradiction, that
between the colonizer and the colonized.

But what about the contradiction between priest and peasant in
rural society, the contradiction between those dispensers of shastric
injunction for whom to touch a plough is adharma and their victims
for whom the labour on the rice fields is dharma itself, the contradiction
between a caste association ( samaj ) led more often than not by its elite
and the sick amongst its members handed over to sacerdotal authority
as a gesture of willing subordination to Brahmanism and landlord-
ism? When AbhoyMandal ofMomrejpur, considered polluted by the
asthmatic attacks suffered by his mother-in-law, submits himself for
expiation to the local council of priests and says, ‘I am utterly destitute;
would the revered gentlemen be kind enough to issue a prescription
that is commensurate to my misery?’4 or when Panchanan Manna of
Chhotobainan, his body racked by anal cancer, pleads before a similar
authority in his own village, ‘I am very poor; 1 shall submit myself to
the purificatory rites of course; please prescribe something suitable fpr
a pauper’5 — are we to allow these plaintive voices to be drowned in
the din of a statist historiography? What kind of history of our people
would that make, were it to turn a deaf ear to these histories which
constitute, for that period, the density of power relations in a civil
society where the colonizer s authority was still far from established?

Yet who amongst us as historians of India can claim not to have been
compromised by elitism of this particular kind — namely, statism? It
pervades so obviously the work of scholars who follow the colonialist
model that I would rather not take your time over it: in any case, 1 have
already discussed that question elsewhere at some length.6 All that
need be said here is simply that the statist point of view which informs
the colonialist model is identical with die colonizer s own standpoint:
the state it refers to is none other than the Raj itself However, there is
a statism which prevails in nationalist and Marxist discourses as well.
The referent in both of these is a state that differs in a significant res-

4 Ibid., no. 257.

5 Ibid., no. 258.

6 In ‘Dominance without Hegemony and its Historiography , Subaltern
Studies VI (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 210-309.

311

The Small Voice of History

pect from that in colonialist writing. The difference is one between
power realized in a well-formed and well-established regime of many
years’ standing and power that is yet to actualize; a dream of power. It
is a dream that anticipates a nation-state with emphasis laid primarily
on self-determination defined in liberal-nationalist writing by only
the most general liberal-democratic terms, and in left-nationalist and
Marxist writing by state-socialist terms. In either case historiography
is dominated by the hypothesis of a principal contradiction which
once resolved would convert the vision of power into its substance.
Between the two it is the latter that is considerably more complex in
its articulation ofstatism and I shall concentrate on it for the rest of my
talk if only because its intellectual challenge for any critique is more
sophisticated, hence more formidable, than that of nationalist discourse.

It is well known how for many academics and activists concerned
with the problem of social change in the subcontinent the historical
experience of peasant insurgency has been the paradigmatic instance
of an anticipation of power. And that instance has nowhere been more
fully documented than in P. Sundarayya’s monumental history of the
Telangana uprising.7 This was an uprising of the mass of peasants and
agricultural labourers in the south-eastern region of the Indian peninsula
called Telangana, now a part of Andhra Pradesh. The uprising, led by
the Communist Party, assumed the form of an armed struggle directed
first against the princely state of the Nizam of Hyderabad and then
against the Government of India when the latter annexed the kingdom
to the newly founded republic. The rebellion ran its course from 1 946
to 1951 and won some important victories for the rural poor before
being put down by the Indian army. An authoritative account of the
event was published twenty years later by R Sundarayya, the principal
leader of the insurrection, in his book Telangana People's Struggle and
Its Lessons .

The unifying element in Sundarayyas account is power — a vision
of power in which the fight for land and fair wages was significantly
overdetermined by certain administrative, judicial, and military func-
tions. These, properly speaking, are state-like functions, but were re-
duced in this instance to the level of local authority because of the

7 P Sundarayya, Telangana Peoples Struggle and Its Lessons (Calcutta:
Communist Party of India-Marxist, 1972^.

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The Small Voice of History

character and scope of the struggle. Yet the latter with all its limitations
was oriented towards a contest for state power as acknowledged by its
adversaries — the landlord state of the Nizam and the bourgeois state
of Independent India. The organs of its authority and the nature of the
programmes envisaged for the areas under its control also- testified to
such an orientation. Power, anticipated thus, was to be won in the form
of an embryonic state by the resolution of that ‘principal contradic-
tion which, apparently, was not quite the same under the Nizams rule
as under Nehrus. Whatever that was — and party theoreticians were
locked in an interminable wrangle over the issue — its resolution in
a manner favourable to the people could be achieved, according to
them, only by means of armed resistance. It followed, therefore, that
the values most appreciated in this struggle — values such as heroism,
sacrifice, martyrdom, etc. — were those that informed such resistance.
In a history written to uphold the exemplary character of that struggle
one would expect those values and the corresponding deeds and
sentiments to dominate.

All these three aspects of the Telangana movement — that is, an
anticipation of state power, strategies and programmes designed for its
realization, and the corresponding values — are neatly integrated in
Sundarayyas narrative. It is significant, however, that the condition for
such coherence is a singularity of purpose which has been presupposed
in his account of the struggle and which provides it with its discursive
unity and focus. What would happen to coherence and focus if one
were to question that singularity and ask whether that single struggle
was all that gave the Telangana movement its content?

This disturbing question has indeed been asked. It has been asked
by some of the women who had themselves been active in the up-
rising. Heard first in a series of interviews it has been recorded as
material for a feminist reading of that history by other women of a
younger generation. Two amongst the latter, Vasantha Kannabiran
and K. Lalitha have illuminated for us some of the implications of
this question in their essay ‘That Magic Time’.8 The question, they
say, has something common to all its variations as it occurs in the

8 Vasantha Kannabiran and K. Lalitha, ‘That Magic Time’, in Kumkum
Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (eds), Recasting Women (New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press, 1990), pp. 190-223.

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The Small Voice of History

interviews: it is an undertone of harassment* and a note of pain*
which the voices of the older women carry for the younger ones to
hear.9 ‘Hearing*, we know, ‘is constitutive for discourse.’10 To listen is
already to be open to and existentially disposed towards: one inclines
a little on one side in order to listen. That is why speaking and listening
between generations of women are a condition of solidarity which
serves, in its turn, as the ground for a critique. While solidarity corres-
ponds to listening and inclining towards, Kannabiran and Lalitha’s
critique addresses some of the problems arising from the privative
modes of not-listening, turning a deaf ear to, turning away from. The
small voice speaking in a certain undertone, as if in pain, is pitted, in
this instance, against the privative mode of statist discourse, a com-
manding noise characteristically male in its ‘inability to hear what
the women were saying.’11

What was it that the women were saying in undertones of harassment
and pain? They spoke, of course, of their disappointment that the
movement had not lived up fully to its aim of improving the material
conditions of life by making land and fair wages available for the
working people ofTelangana. That was a disappointment they shared
with men. But the disappointment specific to them as women resulted
from the leaderships failure to honour the perspective of women’s
liberation it had inscribed in the ideology and programme of the
struggle. It was that perspective which had mobilized them en masse.
They-saw in it the promise of emancipation from an ancient thraldom
which with all the diversity of its instruments and codes of subjugation
was unified by a singular exercise of authority — that is, male dominance.
Such dominance was, of course, parametric to Indian parliamentary
politics. That it would be so for the politics of insurrection as well was
what Telangana women were soon to find out from their experience as
participants.

It is not difficult, therefore, to understand why the strength women
added to the movement by their numbers, enthusiasm, and hope
should have generated some tension within it. It was not a tension that

9 Ibid., pp. 194, 196.

10 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987),

p. 206.

11 Kannabiran and Lalitha, in Recasting Women , p. 199.

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The Small Voice of History

could be solved without altering in some fundamental sense the
perspective of the struggle as worked out by its leaders. Womens eman-
cipation was for them simply a sum of equal rights — an end to be
achieved by reformist measures. Emancipation by reform had indeed
attracted women initially to the movement. However, as they surged
forward to participate actively in it, the very impetuosity of that surge
with all its buffeting, wrenching, and overflowing made it impossible
for the notion of emancipation to keep standing where the leadership
had put it. The turbulence turned out to be the mould for a new con-
cept of emancipation. It no longer sufficed to think of it as a package
of benefits conferred on women by the design and initiative of men.
Henceforth, the idea of equal rights would tend to go beyond legalism
to demand nothing less than the self-determination of women as its
content. Emancipation would be a process rather than an end and
women its agency rather than its beneficiaries.

There is no recognition at all in Sundarayyas work of womens
agency either as a concept or as a matter of fact. Consider the following
passage which sets the tone for his approach to this important theme
in a chapter concerned entirely with womens role in the Telangana
Movement. He speaks with genuine admiration about ‘that tremendous
revolutionary spirit and energy that is smouldering in our economically
and socially oppressed womenfolk’ and goes on to observe in the next
sentence: ‘If we only take a little trouble to enable it to emerge out
of its old tradition-bound shell and try to channel it in the proper revolu-
tionary direction , what a mighty upheaval it will lead to.’12 The first
person plural speaks here obviously for a predominantly male leadership
unaware of or indifferent ro the fact that it is itself trapped in an ‘old
tradition-bound shell5 in its attitude to women. Yet it invests itself in
the triple role of the stronger condescending ‘to enable those presumed
to be the weaker, the enlightened undertaking to liberate those still
imprisoned by tradition, and of course the avant-garde ready ‘to
channel5 the energies of a backward and gendered mass towards the
proper revolutionary direction. The elitism of this stance can hardly
be overstated.

It is no wonder, therefore, that the programmatic gestures made
towards emancipation were not allowed by the leadership to shift out

12 Sundarayya, Telangana Peoples Struggle , pp. 328-9. Emphasis added.

315

The Small Voice of History

of the groove of reform, and the authorized view of womens participa-
tion remained one of sheer instrumentality. Consequently, when the
crunch came at any point of the movement and a decision had to be
taken to resolve some problem or other of male dominance in a manner
likely to undermine it, the solution was deferred, avoided, or simply
ruled out within the party in the name of organizational discipline —
a question about which Kannabiran and Lalitha have much to say —
and within the community at large in the name of respect for mass opi-
nion.13 The tribune in either case was patriarchy. ‘Mass opinion was
its alibi to harness expediency to its own authority, and organizational
discipline its pretext to deal with questions of sexuality by a code that
denounced questioning itself as subversive.

The writing of history, I regret to say, conforms fully to patriarchy
in Sundarayyas narrative. The principles of selection and evaluation
common to all historiography are in agreement herewith a prefabricated
statist perspective in which a hierarchized view of contradiction up-
holds a hierarchized view of gender relations with no acknowledgement
at all of womens agency in the movement. With all its goodwill
towards women and praise showered lavishly on their courage, sacri-
fice, ingenuity, etc., that writing remains dear to ‘what the women
were saying’.

But suppose there were a historiography that regarded ‘what the
women were saying* as integral to its project, what kind of history
would it write? The question is, for me, so complex and far-reaching
that I can do no more than make some general observations at this
stage. At this stage, because our critique of statist discourse cannot by
itself produce an alternative historiography. For that to happen the
critique must move beyond conceptualization into the next stage —
that is, the practice of re-writing that history.

A re-writing of the history of the Telangana movement that is
attentive to the undertones of harassment’ and the ‘note of pain in
women s voices will, in the first place, challenge the univocity of statist
discourse. One of the most important consequences of the ensuing
contest will be to destroy the hierarchization which privileges one

13 ‘No decision was to be given which would put mass opinion against us.’
Thus Sundarayya, Telangana Peoples Struggle , on questions of marriage and
sexuality, ibid., p. 351.

316 The Small Voice of History

particular set of contradictions as principal or dominant or central and
regards the need for its solution as prior to or more urgent than that
for all the others.

Secondly, a re-writing that heeds the small voice of history will put
the question of agency and instrumentality back into the narrative.
The latter, in its authorized version, has no room for it. The story of
theinsurrection is told with its agency invested exclusively in the party,
the leadership, and the male, while the other active elements are all
relegated to a state of instrumentality subject to no change under the
impact of the developing movement. In a new historical account this
metaphysical view will clash with the idea that women were agents
rather than instruments of the movement which was itself constituted
by their participation. This will inevitably destroy the image of women
as passive beneficiaries of a struggle for equal rights’ waged by others
on their behalf The concept of ‘equal rights’ will, in its turn, lose its
legalistic connotation and recover its dignity as an essential aspect of
the self-ernancipation of women.

Thirdly, I feel that women’s voice, once it is heard, will activate and
make audible the other small voices as well. Those of the adivasis — the
aboriginal populations of the region — for instance. They too have
been marginalized and instrumentalized in the statist discourse. Here
again, as in the case of women, the garland of praise for their courage
and sacrifice is no compensation for the lack of an acknowledgement
of their agency. What I have in mind here is not simply a revision on
empirical grounds alone. I want historiography to push the logic of its
revision to a point where the very idea of instrumentality, the last re-
fuge of elitism, will be interrogated and reassessed not only with regard
to women but all participants.

Finally, a narratological point. If the small vpice of history gets a
hearing at all in some revised account of theTelangana struggle, it will
do so only by interrupting the telling in the dominant version, break-
ing up its storyline and making a mess of its plot. For the authority of
that version inheres in the structure of the narrative itself — a structure
informed in post-Enlighrenment historiography, as in the novel, by a
certain order of coherence and linearity. It is that order which dictates
what should be included in the story and what left out, how the plot
should develop in a manner consistent with its eventual outcome, and

The Small Voice of History 317

how the diversities of character and event should be controlled
according to the logic of the main action.

Insofar as the univocity of statist discourse relies on such an order,
a certain disorderliness — a radical deviation from the model that has
dominated the writing of history for the last three hundred years — will
be an essential requirement for our revision. What precise form such
disorder may assume is hard to predict. Perhaps it will force the
narrative to stutter in its articulation instead of delivering in an even
flow of words; perhaps the linearity of its progress will dissolve in loops
and tangles; perhaps chronology itself, the sacred cow of historiography,
will be sacrificed at the altar of a capricious, quasi-Puranic time which
is not ashamed of its cyclicity. All one can say at this point is that the
overthrow of the regime of bourgeois narratology will be the condition
of that new historiography sensitized to the undertones of despair and
determination in womans voice, the voice of a defiant subalternity
committed to writing its own history.

Introduction to the
Subaltern Studies Reader

The editors of Subaltern Studies have done me an honour by
asking me to introduce this collection of essays. It is repre-
sentative not only of the intellectual range spanned by the
project but also of certain distinctions the contributors maintain
between themselves within an agreed orientation. This has indeed
been a hallmark of Subaltern Studies from the very beginning — this
insistence on a solidarity that would not reduce individual voices,
styles, and approaches to a flat and undifferentiated uniformity. It is
a strategy that is not without its risks, of course. It has opened us to
attack from those party-liners, one-horse riders, and other moniscs
who had looked for the straight and the steady and the singular in our
work only to find us wanting. Bui wi have laken that risk in order to
generate and continually renew a space that is vital to a project like
ours. For its very existence, in concept as well as practice, depends on
its ability to negotiate the tensions of an irreducible noncoincidence
within it — a stubborn reminder that is an essential condition of its
creativity and the source of its energies.

It is perfectly consonant with such a strategy that the editorial
collective should call on me to add a few introductory words to the
volume. For my place in this project is one that stands for a certain

Copyright © 1997 Ranajit Guha. First published in Ranajit Guha, ed.,
A Subaltern Studies Reader 1986-1995 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1997), pp. ix-xxii.

Introduction to the Subaltern Studies Reader

319

difference within its history. It is a difference of generations, which set
me apart from each of the other contributors by at least twenty-five
years. Much of what gave Subaltern Studies its distinctive character
and individuality during the first decade of its career — that is, roughly
the period covered by these essays — is owed to this hiatus, confirming
someofWilhelm Dilthey s insights into the phenomenon of generation.1
In an article published over a century ago and left largely unnoticed,
he argues that a simple chronology of individual lives studied in suc-
cession is not enough for the history of the social sciences. For such
history to be situated in life itself it is necessary for its narrative to be
informed by yet another concept of time, namely, that of generation.
The latter, a descriptive term for the temporal span of lives lived to-
gether in a community, helps us to focus, he says, on ‘the relation-
ship of contemporaneity amongst individuals — that is, their sense of
shared childhood and youth and of a maturity reached nearly at the
same time taken as ‘the basis for a deeper bond between such people.’2

A generation, conceptualized thus, acts not only as a force for conti-
nuity but also as one that promotes diversity and change, since
what it inherits is always less than the whole of its ancestral culture.
Humanity, says Dilthey, does not grow like the annual ring of a tree,
and cultural transfer over time is necessarily incomplete. Important
parts of the achievement of forebears are inevitably lost to the succes-
sors— a point he illustrates by showing how ancient Greek thought
was assimilated by the Italian Renaissance in less than its full meas-
ure, and even that took centuries.3 But tradition is eroded by time
not only in the long run. It suffers some loss even by being handed
down from one generation to the next, and the modification this
brings about gains in depth and scope as the inheritors set to work on
their legacy with all the revisionist energies that belong to their own
time and their own world — in sum, to their own life as distinct from

1 Wilhelm Dilthey, ‘Ober das Studium der Geschichte der Wissenschaften
vomMenschen,derGescllschaftunddemStaat’ (1875), pp. 31-73, in Gesam -
melte Schrijien, vol. 5 (Stuttgart: TeubnerVerlag, 1957). For our citations of and
reference to Dilthey, see sec. 2 of that article, pp. 36-41.

2 Ibid., p. 37.

3 Ibid., pp. 38-9.

320 The Small Voice of History

that of their predecessors. Thanks to this generational appropriation
a culture opens up as a field of difference ready to be sown with
doubt and turn into an encounter between the experience of one life-
span nearing its end and that of another about to make its debut.

The political and cultural history of India, prior to Independence,
has not been wanting in such encounters, as witness those, for instance,
between Surendranath Banerjee’s generation and that of Aurobindo
Ghosh s within the Swadeshi movement, between Tilak s and Gandhi s
within nationalist politics of the years immediately following World
War I, between Rabindranath Tagores and Buddhadeb Basus in
Bangla literature, between Girishchandra Ghoshs and Sisirkumar
Bhaduri s in the theatre, and so on, although much work needs yet to
bedoneon their implications. However, the virulence of such encounters
acquired a new intensity and meaning after the transfer of power, as
became obvious when the generation that had reached its maturity
during the last two decades of the Raj met that of the Midnights
Children in the turbulence of the 1 970s.

That decade — or, to be more precise, the years between theNaxalbari
uprising and the end of the Emergency — has often been described
as a period of disillusionment and Subaltern Studies as one of its
outcomes. There is nothing wrong with this observation except that it
is stuck at a level of generality and helps little to explain how and pre-
cisely in what sense our project may be said to owe its formation to the
disillusionment of those times. For even illusion does not work in
quite the same way for the young and the old. It comes in two forms —
the illusion of hope and the illusion of recollection, according to
Kierkegaard. ‘Youth’, he says, ‘has the illusion of hope; the adult has
the illusion of recollection . . . The youth has illusions, hopes for
something extraordinary from life and from himself; the adult, in
recompense, is often found to have illusions about his memories of
his youth.’4

Read in the light of this observation, the questions that gave voice
to the disillusionment of the 1970s assume the significance of an
ontological divide between generations. There were two kinds of such
questions, which, bunched loosely together, were as follows:

4 So ren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1983), p. 58.

Introduction to the Subaltern Studies Reader

321

1. What was there in our colonial past and our engagement with
nationalism to land us in our current predicament — that is, the
aggravating and seemingly insoluble difficulties of the nation-
state?

2. How are the unbearable difficulties of our current condition
compatible with and explained by what happened during colo-
nial rule and our predecessors' engagement with the politics and
culture of that period?

Each of these spoke, no doubt, of disillusionment caused ty failed
possibilities. However, there was something indefinite about that
sense of failure. Phrased in interrogatives, it carried the suggestion
that things had not run their full course yet and a turn for the better
could not be ruled out. In other words, the mood characteristic of this
disillusionment was one of anxiety suspended between despair and
expectation and projected, as such, into the future. Yet with all that was
common between old and young in the future-directedness of this
mood, it varied significantly between the two instances in its temporal
articulation. For the disillusionment that surfaced in that anxiety
contemporaneously for both generations within the same decade, that
is, within a now* each could call its own, had its source in two rather
differently conceived pasts.

The past that the first set of questions had as its referent was clearly
that of the generations whose adolescence and youth had coincided
approximately with the last twenty years of colonial rule. It was a past
pregnant with a possibility specific to their time and the expectations
it held for them — that is, the possibility of an imminent end to the Raj
and the birth of a sovereign nation-state. Yet when both Independence
and nationhood actualized, finally, in the transfer of power, the
generation for whom these had been the sine qua non of a future be-
yond colonialism felt betrayed. This was a frustration that could hardly
be avoided. For these hopes and ideas, which had ignited and spread
so well in the heat of an embattled nationalism, died down as soon as
power was grasped. What had glowed once as an immense possibility
turned to ashes as mere opportunity, and barely a handful even of that.
No dreams could survive in that climate of hardship and uncertainty.
For Indians .who had already reached adulthood by that fateful
year, 1947, loss of illusion would come therefore as the remembrance

322 The Small Voice of History

of a gigantic promise that had bitten but managed somehow to
get away.

The disillusionment of the Midnights Children (a generation so
named in a brilliant stroke of apt self-description by one of its most
inventive children) was of a different order altogether. Recollection
had little to do with it, if only because they had nothing to recollect as
a past prior to Independence. Born to citizenship in a sovereign re-
public, they had their nationhood with all its promise already constituted
for them. It was a promise that relied on the nation-state for its
fulfilment. Since that failed to materialize even two decades after
Britain’s retreat from South Asia, the despair that seized the younger
generation in the 1 970s could truly be ascribed to a disillusionment
of hope.

Io dismiss that historic despair simply as youths impatience with
those official agencies and institutions that had failed to deliver the
future to it would be to take a narrowly statist view of that phenomenon.
For there was more to it than the drama of Naxalite clashes with the
organs of the state and the violence of counter-insurgency measures
adopted by the latter. The critique addressed to the rulers of the day
extended far beyond them to all incumbents of authority within civil
society. Insofar as these were identified largely with the older generations,
the revolt of the 1 970s amounted to youth calling age to account. The
summons, served in a manner conspicuous for its excess rather than
its wisdom — as in the beheading of a statue of the great nineteenth-
century scholar and reformer, Iswarchandra Vidyasagar, in a Calcutta
park — won the rebels no friends. Yet the very wildness of such gestures
drove the point home, albeit scandalously, that tradition would not
pass unchallenged. The tradition in question ranged all the way from
intellectual culture, such as that associated with the so-called Bengal
Renaissance, to the highly valorized ideals of Indian nationalism
during its encounter with the colonial regime.

What came to be questioned was thus not only the record of the
ruling party, which had been in power for over two decades by then,
but also the entire generation that had put it in power. The young born,
like Saleem Sinai, ‘handcuffed to history', were eager to break away
from what that ‘history meant for them as the legacy of a past made
up of what they regarded as the utopian dreams, hollow promises, and

Introduction to the Subaltern Studies Reader 323

unprincipled political behaviour of their elders. Since the latter had
defined their identity as Indians precisely in terms of such utopias,
promises, and politics, and had imbibed the concomitant values for
moral and spiritual sustenance during the long night of British rule,
they found themselves, the morning after, on the wrong side of an
ontological divide. The doubt voiced so raucously by the youth echoed
in the ensuing debate as the self-doubt of those under interrogation.
It made them question why they were let down so badly by a future
that had looked so good as a possibility simply waiting to come true.
And since expecting a possibility, I come from this possibility toward
that which I myself am’,5 what, they wondered, did its failure make of
their being what they were?

The turbulence of the 1 970s and its pain owed a great deal to this
clash of doubt and self-doubt, interrogation, and response between
generations. One of its many unsettling effects was to bring the impact
of the twenty-year-old nation-states crisis to bear on a settled and in
many respects-codified understanding of the colonial past. A body of
knowledge and interpretation relating to that past, which had been
taken for granted and authorized academically as well as politically
(the extreme politicization of academic work in history under the aegis
of the Government of India — officialization, for short — being one of
the principal features of education during this period), was now
subjected to doubt in such a way as to lose its certainties.

Subaltern Studies , a child of its times, was drawn from its very in-
ception into the argument that broke out. What made that possi-
ble and indeed necessary was not only its place in the sequence of
generations, which led, of course, to a continuous dialogue with the
proximate age groups, but also its freedom from institutional cons-
traints. Ail assortment of marginalized academics — graduate students
yet to complete their dissertations, two or three very young scholars
only recently admitted to the teaching profession, and an older man
stuck at its lowest rung apparently for good — it had the advantage of
owing no loyalty to any department, faculty, school, or party. With
no curriculum, no dogma, no official line to guide it, no professor,

3 Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology , trans. Albert
Hofstadter, rev. edn (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 265.

324

The Small Voice of History

prophet, or politburo to watch its every step, it was an outsider only
too eager to listen to and participate in the controversies agitating the
space beyond and around the temples of learning and the political
headquarters. When the noise of the first exchanges was heard in the
streets, it did not seek refuge behind intellectual or moral palisades,
like some others among its contemporaries, but rushed out and joined.

Thanks to that sense of freedom (and, one might add, impetuosity),
it was possible for us to inaugurate our project with the words: ‘The
historiography of Indian nationalism has for a long time been dominated
by elitism — colonialist elitism and bourgeois-nationalist elitism.’6
With the obligatory invocation of gods and manes left out of this
exordium, indeed with the gods of Britain’s neocolonialist scholarship
and the manes of Indian bourgeois-nationalist scholarship confronted
so polemically, a statement of this kind was irreverence approaching
sheer impudence for many in authority. If they failed to kill the project
simply by ignoring it or by broadsides ranging between the narrowest
possible partisan attacks and some of the ugliest slanders ever heard in
Indian academic discussion, it was only because our critique of elitism
was rooted in an understanding of the configuration of power, which
was as well supported by research as it was informed by theory. The
domain of politics, we argued, was structurally split and not unified
and homogeneous, as elite interpretation had made it out to be. To
recall the words in which this thesis was formulated in the statement
mentioned above:

What is clearly left out of this un-historical [elitist] historiography is
the politics of the people. For parallel to the domain of elite politics there
existed throughout the colonial period another domain of Indian
politics in which the principal actors were not the dominant groups of
the indigenous society or the colonial authorities but the subaltern
classes and groups constituting the mass of the labouring population
and intermediate strata in town and country — that is, the people. This
was an autonomous domain, for it neither originated from elite politics
nor did its existence depend on the latter.7

0 kanajit Guha, ed., Subaltern Studies 1 (Delhi: Oxford University Press,

1982), p. 1.

7 Ibid., p. 4.

Introduction to the Subaltern Studies Reader

325

The co-existence of these two domains or streams, which can be
sensed by intuition and proved by demonstration as well, was the index
of an important historical truth, that is, the failure of the Indian
bourgeoisie to speak for the nation. There were vast areas in the life and
consciousness of the people which were never integrated into their
hegemony.8

This insight, which stands sharply in contrast to a characteristic
blindness of elite discourse, has had a great deal to do with whatever
is distinctive about Subaltern Studies. All the essays presented in this
reader, as well as the nine volumes of the series and the thirteen mono-
graphs published in as many years by the members of the collective
since 1982, 9 when the project made its debut (not counting their
numerous contributions to periodicals and anthologies, or the writings
of those who have been working along with the project without being
formally associated with it), bear witness to that distinction. This can
be grasped in all its scope and detail only by a comprehensive study

8 Ibid., pp. 5-6.

9 Shahid Amin, Sugarcane and Sugar in Gorakhpur: An Inquiry into Peasant
Production for Capitalist Enterprise in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University
Press. 1984); Shahid Amin, Event, Metaphor, Memory : Chauri Chaura, 1922-
1992 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1 995); David Arnold, Police Power and
Colonial Rule: Madras, 1859-1947 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986);
David Arnold. Famine: Social Crisis and Historical Change (Oxford: Blackwell,
1 988); Gau tarn Bhadra, Iman o nishan: Unish shatake banglar krishak chaitanyer
ek adhyay (Calcutta: Subarnarekha. 1994): Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rethinking
Working-Class History: Bengal, 1890-1940 (Princeton, N .J.: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1989); Partha Chatterjee, Bengal, 1920-1947: The Land Question
(Calcutta: K.P. Bagchi, 1984); Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the
Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse ? (London: Zed Books, 1986); Partha
Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993); RanajitGuha, Elementary
Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1983); Ranajit Guha, An Indian Historiography of India: A Nineteenth-Century
Agenda and Its Implications (Calcutta: K.P. Bagchi, 1988); David Hardiman,
The Coming of the Devi: Adivasi Assertion in Western India (Delhi: Oxford Uni-
versity Piess, 1987); Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction ofCommunalism in
Colonial North India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990).

326

The Small Voice of History

of what amounts to an extensive body of writings, which cannot be
undertaken here. All that need be done for introductory purposes is
briefly to highlight the importance of this thesis for the thematization
of our work on South Asian history and society.

To thematize requires a project to select its objects, deploy them in
a bounded field, and submit them to disciplined inquiry. Consequently,
the procedures of selection and delimitation commit thematizing to
one or more points of view, which must, in every instance, run ahead
of the project concerned and pilot it to the site of investigation. What
may or may not catch its eye is therefore prefigured in thematization.
The failure of elite discourse, in both its imperialist and indigenous
nationalist varieties, to identify, far less interpret, many of the most
significant aspects of our past follows from a thematization framed
rigidly by the presuppositions of its monistic view of colonial power
relations. Subaltern Studies has sought to undo the crimping and con-
cealing effects of that failure by means of an alternative mode of
thematization — that is, by thematizing the structural split of politics
as its central concern. What follows is a brief review of some of the
salient aspects of that alternative.

Displacing the Question of Power

With the structural split of politics recognized as fundamental to the
history of colonialism in South .Asia, the study of power could no
longer be left standing where elite discourse had set it up as an ex-
clusively elitist agenda. Displaced, it now acquired, in Subaltern
Studies , the status of a question straddling the faultline of that split. A
beacon, so to say, whose function would be to illuminate rather than
hide the non-unitary character of that politics, ir would draw attention
to ‘the other domain treated in dom i nan t discourse as of no importance
or even as altogether non-existent.

It follows from the notion of a structural split that the domains
defined by it are always and inevitably in touch with each other. This
does not take away from their autonomy any more than the contiguity
of two states sharing a common border takes away from the sovereignty
of either. By the same token, too, the politics of colonial India has never
been anything other than an articulation of the mutuality of two

Introduction to the Subaltern Studies Reader 327

interacting yet autonomous domains. To cite what was said about such
mutuality in our preface to Subaltern Studies /:

We recognize of course that subordination cannot be understood ex-
cept as one of the constitutive terms in a binary relationship of which
the other is dominance, for ‘subaltern groups are always subject to the
activity of ruling groups, even when they rebel and rise up. * The domi-
nant groups will therefore receive in these volumes the consideration
they deserve without, however, being endowed with that spurious
primacy assigned to them by the long-standing tradition of elitism in
South Asian studies. Indeed, it will be very much a part of our endea-
vour to make sure that our emphasis on the subaltern functions both
as a measure of objective assessment of the role of the elite and as a
critique of elitist interpretations of that role.

Considered thus, the study of colonialism opens up in entirely new
ways to bring into relief the manifold diversities that it has been
beyond the oversimplified elitist interpretation to cope with. From
now on it would have to reckon with two indigenous protagonists and
not just one, that is, the elite, privileged by the dominant discourse
to deal with the rulers on behalf of all the colonized. In other words,
it would no longer suffice to regard politics merely as the sum of all
transactions between the masters rhemselves. For every transaction of
that sort would henceforth require a reference to ‘the other domain’ for
an understanding of its implications, and the presence of the subaltern
would make itself felt even in a scenario where its name has been drop-
ped from the list of actors by oversight or design. All of which adds yet
another dimension to South Asian history, making it even more
complex than ever before.

Most of these complexities derive from the urgency with which this
approach insists on the recognition of such entities and forces of civil
society as are usually left out in the cold by elitist studies of politics. The
analysis and description of power in colonial India, it argues, must no
longer rely on the fatuous concept of the ‘prepolitical*. The invidious
hierarchization of South Asian culture into ‘higher* and ‘lower* levels
or into degrees of ‘backwardness*, according to a blinkered statist view
that did not acknowledge, because it could not see, the articulation of
politics in areas and phenomena inaccessible to the apparatus of the

328

The Small Voice of History

Raj, would cease henceforth to exercise the undisputed authority
invested in it by an academic tradition complicit with imperialism.

Defining the Colonial State as a Dominance
without Hegemony

The monistic view of Indian politics has a certain advantage for elite
discourse. It permits the latter to commit itself to the uncomplicated
notion that the colonial state was generically the same as the metro-
politan state that had sired it, even though it might have warped a little
under ‘Asiatick’ conditions. It carries little weight with this view that
the symptoms of such warping’ made the Raj unlike anything within
the metropolitan experience in some essential respects. For the
difference, trivialized as mere administrative failure or blamed simply
on ‘native character , is dismissed by it as unimportant. One is thus
saved the trouble of confronting the question. What was it that could
justify lumping Britain, the world’s most advanced democracy, the
Mother of Parliaments, generically with the autocracy it had set up in
South Asia? How could a state constituted by its citizens be said not
to be fundamentally different from a colonial state that was a state
without citizenship?

What makes it possible for colonialist discourse to sideline or
altogether avoid this question is the assumption that colonial rule in
South Asia was based on the consent of the colonized, just as much as
the rule of the metropolitan bourgeoisie in a sovereign Western coun-
try is based on its citizens’ consent. An unexamined liberal-imperialist
postulate made grotesque, on occasions, by the claim that the Raj was
a ‘rule of law’, it continues to inform neocolonialist writing until today
as one of its basic tenets. What it does, in effect, is to endow colonialism
with a hegemony denied it by history.

An important-aspect of Subaltern Studies , thematized in a number
of polemical and expository ways, has been to subject this hegemonic
presumption to a thoroughgoing critique. It has tried to show that
there is nothing in the record of the Raj, considered on empirical
grounds alone, to justify any pretension to a rule by consent. The facts
of the case do not support the thesis, put forward by some Cambridge
scholars, that Britain’s rule in South Asia was based on the collaboration

Introduction to the Subaltern Studies Reader

329

of its subjects. For no authority can claim voluntary collaboration
(except as a Nazi euphemism) from its subordinates without allowing
the latter a choice not to collaborate, and such a choice was, of course,
incompatible with the autocracy that was the very essence of that
rulership. Far from being blessed with the agreement and co-operation
of those on whom it had imposed itself by conquest, the incubus
known as the Raj was a dominance without hegemony , that is, a domi-
nance in which the movement of persuasion outweighed that of
coercion without, however, eliminating it altogether.

There is an Indian nationalist version of this spurious claim to
hegemony as well. People’s consent to the rule of ‘their own’ bourgeoisie
was anticipated, according to it, in the anticolonial campaigns launched
by the leading party of the elite — the Indian National Congress — and
actualized subsequently, since Independence, in its long tenure of
governmental power. Here again Subaltern Studies has developed a
wide-ranging critique to put this claim in a radically different pers-
pective. Based on research into some of the most powerful agitations
of the colonial period, especially those known as the Noncooperation,
Civil Disobedience, and Quit India movements, it demonstrates how
on one historic occasion after another and in region after region the
initiative of such campaigns passed from elite leaderships to the mass
of subaltern participants, who defied high command and headquarters
to make these struggles their own by framing them in codes specific to
traditions of popular resistance and phrasing them in idioms derived
from the communitarian experience of working and living together. It
is only a naive and somewhat deceitful historiography that has made
such anti-imperialist mobilization into the ground for bourgeois
claims to hegemony, whereas the evidence speaks of it as precisely the
ground where such claims were contested by the mobilized themselves.

Since Subaltern Studies did not start by investing the bourgeoisie
anticipatively with hegemony, it has been spared the embarrassment of
those tendencies that had expressed enthusiasm about the ascendancy
of the Congress to power in independent India as the fulfilment of a
historic promise of rulership by consent and were proved wrong again
and again by the developing course of events, especially those since the
1970s. The hollowness of such hegemonic pretensions is so painfully
obvious in Indian politics today as to require no elaboration here.

330

The Small Voice of History

Suffice it to say that its thematization in our project so far has been
informed by a vigilance about the impact that the scramble for power
among elite groups has on their relations with the subaltern. The latter
used as pawns in the vicious competition between the dominant ele-
ments end up, inevitably, as their victims. The story of that victimization,
the strength and structure of the resistance it meets from its objects,
and above all the implications of a dominance desperately striving for
a hegemony that continues to elude it are by now part of an already
substantial volume of Subaltern Studies writings.

Investigating the Relation between State and
Civil Society and Its Tensions

A good part of the current difficulties besetting India on so many
fronts is a direct legacy of the Raj. The latter was conspicuous for its
failure to assimilate the society of the colonized to itself. The result was
an uneasy imbrication of what stood for the state with what stood for
civil society, making for a myriad of misfits and an apparently per-
petual tension. Of the numerous and many-pronged attempts made
by the colonial state to assimilate the indigenous society to itself there
was none that was not fully or at least partially thwarted. If it was the
aim of the Raj to paint India red, as that bold metaphor would have
it, all it succeeded in doing was to produce a motley of haphazard
daubs. Yet it was precisely the inconclusive nature of that engagement
that made the resulting image historically so complex, interesting, and
above all unique. It was unique in the sense that the relationship of state
and civil society in every constituent part of the image was so specific
to the South Asian experience, so utterly did it belong there in light and
space, that for all the confusion of the indigenous and the alien in its
texture, and indeed because of such confusion, it stands sui generis
at the very limit of translatability by Western codes. To study colonial
India is therefore to seek a path towards that specificity and to let its
distinctiveness show up in interpretation.

Not the least important of reasons why this specificity has not been
thematized thoroughly or rhoughtfully enough is the notoriously
statist disposition of academic work on South Asian history. It bends
all too easily in favour of the point of view of the state, adopts its

Introduction to the Subaltern Studies Reader

331

perspective without asking questions, and ends up by concentrating
selectively on those parts of the colonial experience that are limited to
this optics. And even these are considered only for their relevance to
the administrative and institutional functions of the state, and not in
terms of the tension that relates it to its other — the civil society.

The recognition of that tension is, by contrast, central to Subaltern
Studies . Its critique of the universalist pretension of capital leads logi-
cally to a thematization informed not by any primacy attributed to the
state but by an awareness of the unresolved problems of its negotiation
with civil society. These problems, exemplified by the growth and
intensification of communal, casteist, regionalist, and other particularist
interests, find their place in this project not as they do in a conventional
South Asian Studies programme, with modernity and tradition,
development and underdevelopment, progressivism and conservatism,
and West and East ranged on opposite sides, but as witness to the hist-
oric threshold that the so-called universalism of a Eurocentric reason
and its engine of global expansion — capital — failed to cross in the age
of colonialism.

However, the function of a threshold is not only to turn its back on
some intrusive externality. It also fences in and inaugurates thereby the
space a dwelling has as its own. This enables the latter to look out to
what is beyond and to let that into its environment on its own terms.
The result is to allow an incoming light to blend with one that is local,
transforming both. The advent of Europe’s reason in South Asia as part
of a colonial cargo also had a transformative impact, no doubt. But
thanks to the indigenous society’s refusal to dignify an alien rulership
with hegemony, the transformation shaped up essentially as a process
of Indianizing the idioms of modernity imported by the Raj.

Some of these idioms were rejected as altogether incompatible,
while others were admitted to South Asian culture in much the same
way as the languages of the subcontinent made room for European
words in their vocabularies. To say gelash for glass’, tebil for ‘table’,
teram for ‘tram’, istimar for ‘steamer’, and so fordi, is, in each instance,
to allow an English phrase to come into an Indian language, but to do
so striedy on terms set by the host, which is Bangla here. The initiative
of such assimilation rests entirely with the latter, as witness, among
other things, the characteristic interposition here of a vowel splitting

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The Small Voice of History

up, respectively, £ and /, £and /, rand r, rand r. Modernity, too, has gone
through a process in which the harshness of statist intervention acting
on its behalf and the haughtiness of its civilizing claims were overcome
by stratagems of adaptation so authentically Indian that only a Euro-
centric scholarship, unfortunately not confined to Europe alone,
could mistake it for Westernization.

Rescued thus from the shibboleths of Westernization, the question
of modernism in India leads to other and more fundamental questions.
These fall roughly into two groups. First, there are those that turn
inward to ask how this process of modernization that is India’s own
links up with the still obscure process of nation formation as articulated
in nationalism, nation-state, and generally nationhood, and whether
the apparently unresolved tension between state and civil society is not
indeed the cpiphenomenon of a deeper and basic conflict between
state and community mediated by a still far from fully formed civil
society.

Second, there are those questions that face outward to confront the
supposedly universal status of the European experience — the ifniversal-
izing function of its capital, the universality of its reason, and the
complicity of capital and reason in elevating the particular brand of
European modernity to a universal model valid for all continents and
all mankind — in short, questions that cast doubt on the presumption
of what is European and modern as paradigmatically metropolitan
and on the elevation of its historv, a bundle of national and regional
specificities like any other history, to Universal History.

We had set out on this survey with an array of questions in order to
index the difference between two proximate generations — those of the
Midnights Children and their immediate predecessors — in their
involvement with the project of Subaltern Studies as it emerged
from the turbulence and anxieties of the 1970s. We conclude, again,
with questions bearing on the difference between the South Asian and
European experiences in the age of colonialism, nationalism, and
modernism. No attempt has been made here fully to answer these
questions. For the aim of this introduction is simply to try to let a
beginning disclose itself, if in no more than the barest outline. A
beginning, true to itself, has to begin with questions.

Writing the Past
Where Generations Meet

The Association for Asian Studies has done me an honour by
inviting me to this session of its annual meeting. It is an hon-
our done, through me, to the entire community of scholars
engaged in Asian Studies as writers, teachers, and students. What
delights me most about this occasion is that it makes it possible for me
to meet so many of my colleagues of the younger generation. I feel
deeply moved for it is they rather than my peers who have sustained
me and given me the courage to carry on with my work for five de-
cades. I don’t know how better to express my gratitude to them than
by reflecting on what it means for me, an old man, to be at such a meet-
ing of the generations.

I am aware of course that any generational gathering of this kind
connotes more than the occasion or intention that brings it about.
Which is why it has to deal with a certain excess of meaning and absorb
it by rituals, ceremonies, or other appropriate gestures. The function
of these gestures is to indicate what is involved in such a meeting as an
overflow beyond the agenda fitted to any particular event or purpose.
Whether it is a case of some tribe, community, or family bringing its
youth together with the elders to celebrate a calendrical festival or
deliberate on some means to cope with a catastrophe, it is in each
instance nothing less than a meeting of life with life. A session like this.

Copyright © 2001 Ranajit Guha. Unpublished address to the annual meet-
ing of the Association of Asian Studies in Chicago, March 2001.

334

The Small Voice of History

where younger academics are hosts to one so much older, is not very
different either: it too is a meeting of life with life.

However, this description risks being left at the level of tautology
unless we ask what it concretely means for life to meet life at genera-
tional gatherings. What happens there? What happens is that something
is handed down on such occasions. This is as good an answer as any
other to start with and has the advantage of being a matter of common
perception. But it still begs the question about the nature of what is
called handing down. Handing down is of course temporal by defi-
nition. It is a moment of the past understood as a transaction between
the young and the old. It is customary to speak of this phenomenon
as tradition in English, or as aitihya in many of the Indie languages.
Taken to be synonymous, the two phrases, i.e. tradition and aitihya,
do not, however, stand in quite the same relation to time. Aitihya, an
ancient word adapted by the vernaculars of the subcontinent from
Sanskrit, connotes parampard, that is, the order of succession in a relay
of traditional wisdom ( pdramparyopadese syadaitihyamitihavyam :
Amarakosa, 2.7.12). The aspect of time emphasized in this usage is
obviously that of continuity. By contrast, tradition and its synonyms
in European languages are anchored to memory. As such, the aspect of
time they connote stands for a past that is stored and retrieved.

This is not a negligible difference. It alerts us to the possibility that
there might have been a time when the Indian idea of historicality
did not conform, as it does now, to the Western notion of history. A
twofold distinction is at work here. In the first place, aitihya, etymologi-
cally a cognate of itihdsa , the generic name for narratives of the past,
concerns, as we ha' e seen, a process of transmission from one gene-
ration to the next. An ordered but absolutely open-ended succession,
it is a temporal flow with no room in its concept for deposits or even
sedimentation. Which is why — and this is the other distinctive feature
of aitihya — its content, as a serialized story ( katha) or a set of shastric
lessons ( upadesa ), has no standing at all as objective evidence. Any
claim to authority in this regard is opposed firmly by both the great
schools of Nyaya and Samkhya philosophy.1

1 For Nyaya on this point see Vatsyayanas commentary on 2.1.64 where
aitihya is identified as purdkalpa , hence biased and unreliable. For Samkhya, see
theTartvabodhini on the t ejection of aitihya as pramana or proof on the ground
of its being a discourse without an identifiable speaker {avijhatapravaktrkam).

335

Writing the Past Where Generations Meet

There is hardly anything in this view thar is shared, on either count,
by Western philosophies of history. In the most elaborate and still
the most influential of these as expounded by Hegel in the famous
'Introduction to his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History , the
process of handing down is one that is conspicuous for its closure.2 It
is mediated, and indeed stoppered, by memory. For, ‘Time’, says
Hegel, entails the property of negativity' ( 1 27). This property accrues
to it as an inexorable succession of nows. Following the Aristotelian
model that serves for its concept, each particular now which constitutes
this torrent supersedes, hence negates, itself by passing into another
now, and everything perishes in its encounter with time.

The spectre of that unsparing destructiveness haunts Hegel’s thinking
on this question. Historical references to the decline of great civilizations
of the past and mythic imageries of Chronos devouring its children are
witness, in his prose, to the transience of all things. Driven by anxiety,
philosophy seeks asylum with Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, as
a last resort. For she has her doors open to all who are lucky enough
not to fall Victim to the unhistorical power of time/3 Regarded thus,
history amounts to a record of survival inscribed in memory. Which
goes to explain why memory is so highly valorized in historiography.

The value of memory consists in this case primarily in its objectifying
function. Not only does it stop the past from dissolving altogether
in the flow of time and store what is left, it also helps the remainder to
coagulate as experience. This is a defining principle of the human con-
dition, according to Aristotle. All animals have memories, he says in
Metaphysics (980b25-981a5), but those other than humans ‘have
but little of connected experience.' It is memory that generates experi-
ence in human beings, ‘for the several memories of the same thing
produce finally the capacity for a single experience. And . . . science
and art come to men through experience.'4 The importance of mem-
ory for historiography lies precisely in this connection of knowledge

2 References in parenthesis are to pages of G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Phi-
losophy of World History. Introduction: Reason in History , trans. H.B. Nisbett
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1 982); henceforth. Lectures on World
History.

3 Hegel, Aesthetics /: 459 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975).

4 The Works of Aristotle, vol. VIII: Metaphysics , trans. W.D. Ross (Oxford:
Clarendon Press: 2nd edn, 1928).

336 The Small Voice of History

and experience, and no art or science relies more on the latter in
order to authenticate itself. For evidence which serves every historical
discourse as the objective foundation of its claim to truth is nothing
other than the past nurtured in the womb of memory and born again
as experience. Hegel is therefore quite consistent in his philosophy of
history when he matches his appreciation of the goddess of memory
to his admiration for Herodotus and Thucydides, described by him as
authors of ‘original history’, who, he says, ‘have themselves witnessed,
experienced and lived through the deeds, events and situations they
describe’ (12). The tribute he pays here to the immediacy of experience
is paradigmatic. In all transactions between any two generations the
authority of the older benefits from the presumption that what it
hands down as recollected deeds, events, and situations stands for the
truth of the past simply by virtue of their relative proximity to, if not
actual presence at, the time of their occurrence.

But how much does the truth of the past survive its objectification
as experience? Indeed what does it make of the very notion of this so-
called truth? It is hard to avoid these questions once we begin to think
carefully about the way the past is linked to memory, experience, and
recollection. The simplicity of the nexus rests critically on experience
understood as a straight conduit. However, there is nothing about
experience that is really so straight. It is, as we have seen, a curdling of
memory in which all that has been perceived is subject to a dual process
of condensation and realignment. One of these selects the part of the
material that must be left out so that the rest may be retrieved as past
remembered. But for this to happen the other, that is, the reconstructive
part of the process, has to arrange the residual moments in a new com-
position and invest it with a significance that had not been known
before. In other words it is forgetting that enables the past to emerge
meaningfully again and again at each recall.

It is clear that in speaking of recollection thus as the experience of
forgetting we have departed from custom by distributing our emphasis
evenly between its deleting and realigning functions. We have done so
in order to show how forgetting puts experience inescapably and
necessarily under the sign of difference. It is not as the truth of the past
in its universal aspect that the memory of deeds, events, situations, etc.,
is handed down by one generation to the next. Modified by forgetfulness
it is bequeathed as the experience of a particular generation and distin-

337

Writing the Past Where Generations Meet

guished as such from that of another. In this sense an individual and
a generation are somewhat alike. Each is helped by experience to make
the past its own. But no individual makes the past his own in quite the
same way as does any other. Nor does a generation. To understand why
requires some preliminary consideration about what it means for a
past to be made ones own.

There is a past that we share with others as a necessary condition of
our togetherness to make up a community or society. The sharing takes
the form of a common access to and use of a social memory so that we
may be guided in our dealings with our fellows by those mutually
acceptable norms and rules which collective experience has construct-
ed for us. This impersonal experience stands of course for a past that
belongs to nobody in particular. It is a dead past which has its authority
based precisely on its abstraction from what is living in that society.
However, it comes to life again the moment an individual puts it to use
for everyday transactions with others. What resuscitates it thus is
contact with lived experience, and insofar as this experience is ones
own in the first place, the past too is made ones own by him or her who
breathes new life into it. All that constitutes her being as a unique self
is now invested in this past which her present will mobilize in order to
move forward to what she will be. It will enable her to say, after Augus-
tine, that her memory is where she is herself.

Making the past ones own is therefore nothing less than an assertion
of what is for the self an essential condition of its being. This must not
be mistaken for an attempt to recover what has been lost. For the past,
far from being lost, continues to militate with a futural orientation. In
appropriating it, the individual lives up to her project of harnessing
possibility to historicality. But this is fraught with difficulties. Since we
are all born manacled to a pre-existing past, we relate to others in our
everyday comportment according to codes and canons clearly formu-
lated fot us in advance. Indeed there is no community that does not
rely on these for its stability and no interaction between its members
that is not determined by them ahead of its occurrence. That is why the
project of making the past ones own is usually so charged with the
tension of a struggle to wrench free of an inherited thraldom.

However, in this struggle the individual is never alone. Far from
being a solitary monad s combat with a social monolith, it shapes up
in fact as an encounter between generations. For the past at issue here

338 The Small Voice of History

is a legacy the individual shares with her generation. She acts not only
for herself but for the latter as well in making that past her own. This
defines her being with others in terms of a temporal relation that is
neither an undifferentiated social time nor the singularity of individual
presence. It mediates both as what Wilhelm Dilthey has characterized
as ‘the relationship of contemporaneity amongst individuals/5 Bond-
ed together by the mere contingency of proximate birth dates they
tend nevertheless to use it as an emblem of fellowship in their pas-
sage through childhood, adolescence, youth, and maturity, and regard
that development at any stage as a record of their collective experience.
In this way every generation seeks to live up to ‘its own task', and begin
‘all over again , as Kierkegaard has observed.6 It does so by inscribing
its particular history within the general history of a community, so-
ciety, or nation. Thanks to that embedded historicality it often identi-
fies itself by what it considers its entitlement to a portion of social time.
A birthmark of sorts, this is designated by those who are contemporaries
as our time and spans the life of a generation between birth and death.
An acknowledgement of finitude, it stands for the affirmation of a dis-
tinctive historicality.

However, OurTime in which the individual project seeks to realize
itself concretely as a relationship of contemporaneity adds a new twist
as well as some depth to the process of handing over in at least two
ways. In the first place, the very fact of its being constituted as such
involves OurTime in a rivalry. It is pitted against another age group
that too insists on the entitlement of its contemporaries to social time
in its campaign to make their past their own. Clearly, the temporal self-
determination of any generation requires a contest with another.
That is what makes the history of a culture frayed at the edge where
the young meet the old, and it is not possible to plot the resulting

5 For a profound consideration of the significance of generation for history,
see Wilhelm Dilthey, 40ber das Studium der Geschichtc der Wissenschaften
vom Menschen, der Gesellschaft und dem Staat’ (1875)* pp. 32- 73, in Gcsam-
meltcSchriften, vol. 5 (Stuttgart: TeubnerVerlag, 1957). For our citations of and
reference to Dilthey, see sec. 2 of that article, pp. $6-A 1 .

6 Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton
University Press, 1980), p. 7; and Fear and Trembling / Repetition (Princeton,
New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 122.

339

Writing the Past Where Generations Meet

moments of change consistently along a straight line. This is a matter
worth all the emphasis it can get. For there are tempting assumptions —
metaphysical as well as methodological — that can induce us to take
consistency for granted in our study of change. It simplifies the task of
historical representation and enables it to produce elegant drawings in
which the past can be seen to advance neatly from lower to higher
stages of civilization. Any deviation from this line of advance may then
be treated as a lapse in values. In this way historicality comes to be
shrouded by morality in our interpretation of the past. An exercise in
putting the cart before the horse, this overlooks the fact that it is not
value which is at issue here but temporality, and that the appeal to
values follows merely as a tactic for each generation to justify its stand
within a particular segment of social time designated as Our Time.

There is yet another way in which the relay of experience from age
to youth is complicated by the self-affirmation of Our Time. The fact
that it mediates the individuals project of appropriating the past does
not make it any the less her own. Far from merging and dissolv-
ing without a trace in the generational project, what is truly individual
about it acquires a particular salience. For she is an individual only
insofar as the experience and intentionality which constitute her pro-
ject are not identical with those of her contemporaries. In this sense she
belongs to her generation and her community only to a certain extent,
beyond which she is entirely on her own. Appropriation of the past
turns out therefore to be a process in which the individual and the
generational intersect to make up a pattern distinguished by many
shades of ambiguity in the area of overlap. For the individual has been
already and irrevocably constituted by the past that she must break
with in order to make it her own. In this difficult struggle, made all
the more so by its paradoxicality, her affiliation with her generation
counts only as much as does her differentiation from it. As a result, the
break, when it comes, is hardly ever as clean as a surgical operation.
More often than not it amounts to a messy tear with bits of the old
clinging to what is new.

The history of all cultures is witness to this mess. The border where
generations meet is always an area of turbulence. Not all members of
one generation may be assumed to be disposed towards those of an-
other in quite the same way. Motives and intentions vary even within

340 The Small Voice of History

the same age group. Some could be more conciliatory than others in
their attitude to what is handed down. Some would press the claims
of Our Time more vigorously than their contemporaries. Even the
same generation or individual would, in some cases, run with tradition
part of the way and then abruptly reverse. Tensions and inconsisten-
cies abound. This is true of all communities even at the grassroot
level, although the phenomenon is known most by such high-profile
instances as the young romantics turning against their mentors of the
previous generation in the last phase of the Aufklarung, or moving
closer to our region — the discord between the veteran Moderates and
youthful Extremists in Indian politics at the beginning of the twentieth
century, or the alienation of the young modernists from their ageing
master Tagore in the field of literature during the inter-war period.

With so much retraction, betrayal, and parting of ways, so much to
spoil the serenity of generational dialogue, it is perhaps not change but
its absence that requires explanation. For it can happen that a culture
is stuck with a particular mode of historical representation over a very
long time and the competing perspectives of youth and age do not
make the slightest difference. To impute this to tradition alone cannot
take us very far if only because that will still beg the question why. As
we have already found out, tradition allows itself to be modified in the
course of inter-generational transfer and is quite amenable to change.
And yet if historiography as a society’s view of the past happens to be
frozen for long, it may not be unreasonable to think of it as due to
the resistance of some force that is pitted against life itself. What that
force may be will perhaps differ from one instance to another and no
generalization will hold. One can imagine a theocracy where all secular
achievements and aspirations of the past are strictly excluded from
history; or, a totalitarian regime where the past must be interpreted
only according to official guidelines; or, a liberal democracy that with
all its pretension to liberalism and democracy has no room in its
history books for ethnic or religious minorities. None of these need of
course be left to the imagination any longer, for the twentieth-century
experience of statist rewriting of history has shown again and again
how age and youth are equally powerless against Leviathan. Yet, it is
also a matter of experience that in the event Leviathan is overcome by
life, and the past renews itself in writing.

341

Writing the Past Where Generations Meet

The Leviathan that dominated the writing of Indian history for the
greater part of two centuries was the colonial state. However, it was also
during this period that an idea deposited in the subcontinent by the
winds of time began to sprout and slowly take shape. The idea was that
it was right for a people to assert their self-respect by fighting free of
foreign rule. A forward-looking idea that sought an end to the in-
glorious present, it relied critically on the past for support. The past
was invoked again and again from one generation to another, each
distinguished by its own strategy of appropriation, by its own Our
Time. The competition and coalescence between them problematized
the past creatively for successive age groups in art and literature. But
such creativity was confined to civil society. Incapable of assimilating
the latter and indifferent to its project of reclaiming the past, the state
continued to control the interpretation, teaching, and writing of
Indian history by the dead hand of its Education Department. Since
schooling in Indian history was based faithfully on James Mills
doctrine that had defined it as a portion of the British history , hist-
oriography was reduced to a colonialist knowledge. Churned out
by officially authorized textbooks it came to acquire the status of a
Kuhnian kind of normal science thanks to its institutionalization in
the massive public instruction system of the Raj. More than anything
else, these manuals testify to the alienation of this knowledge from all
that aspired for an Indian historiography of India. Written mostly in
vernacular, they followed a model that was to be developed to near
perfection by William Hunter in his well-known work. The Indian
Empire . It reduced the Indian past since 1757 to a simple chronicle of
conquests and viceroyalties — that is, to a garrison history in which the
career of the occupying power was made to hypostatize for the life of
those who had been conquered and held in subjection.

During the 1930s, children of our generation were among the last
of the colonized to be schooled in this kind of history. Since then things
have changed a lot. Whether such change has reached all levels of edu-
cation is something I am unable to judge. But looking back on South
Asian studies in the subcontinent and abroad, it seems to me that
the scenario is no longer what it was twenty-five years ago so far as it
concerns research, writing, and generally academic work on the Indian
past. The indications are that life has at last asserted itself over the habit

342

The Small Voice of History

of thinking of that past as we were taught to think during the colonial
era. It will be premature to regard this development as anything like a
transformation yet. What is positive about it, however, is that the
initiative for rethinking is now entirely with the youth — the generation
of Midnight s Children and younger.

It has taken nearly three decades since Independence for this ini-
tiative to form and gather momentum. That long, because institutional
and ideological resistance had slowed down the process of decolon-
ization of the mind. But by the 1970s the ground had already been
cleared for the generations to meet and transact in a manner that would
not have been possible during the Raj, if only because state and civil
society were divided by an unbridgeable chasm. If Independence did
not close the gap altogether, it certainly reduced it enough to allow the
pent-up yearning of decades to translate itself in an open contest
between the youth and the old for appropriation of the past. Each
party seized on the early years of the new republic as Our Time and
sought to come to terms with it by investing the past with its cur-
rent anxieties.

These anxieties were caused no doubt by frustration. The young
born around 1947 were frustrated because the nation-state had failed
to provide those conditions of well being which its citizens had come
to expect as a matter of right, not the least because the new rulers had
been loud and generous with their promises in this respect. Those who
had grown up during the last two decades of the Raj were, on their part,
frustrated because the performance of the nation-state did not live up
to the hopes generated and nurtured by the nationalism that had fired
their youth. Each generation was disillusioned thus in its own way. By
turning to the past to understand why this should have been so, each
sought to make it its own by an interpretation constructed differently
from the other s. Encounters like this are never easy. As is often the case,
feathers get ruffled and the intelligence of debate is obscured by
acrimony. Indeed the clash of interpretations has on occasions tended
to degenerate into tumult during the last two decades. But the dust
seems to have settled sufficiently to enable us to see the study of the
colonial past taking shape progressively in conformity to the will and
intentionality of those who have come of age since Independence. The
agenda for Indian historiography has never been more youthfully set.

343

Writing the Past Where Generations Meet

We are of course still some way from anything like a total change
and the development is still rather tentative. However, there are two
features of this orientation which deserve notice even at this early
stage. The first of these concerns the scope of historiography. I doubt
if even the most casual observer will fail to notice how the Indian past
has opened up since the 1980s in ways never seen before. Aspects of
the life of our people ignored by imperial arrogance and overlooked
in nationalist interpretation have for the first time earned recognition
in historical narratives. It is as if the past has been induced to break
200 years of silence and make its fund of untold stories available for
the youth to write into history. When they began to do so in the early
1980s, their effort was greeted with less than enthusiasm by many
amongst the senior academics. ‘Is this history?’ they asked in deri-
sion and disbelief. They had reason to be upset. Educated in colo-
nial schools, they had learnt to distinguish the historical from the
unhistorical by canons which were obviously being flouted by these
cheeky young scholars. Events that propriety had excluded as unworthy
of historiography were now dignified into plots without any em-
barrassment at all. The doors so zealously guarded by our discipline’
against intrusion by the undesirables were thrown wide open to admit
women, adivasis, daiits — generally, the entire subaltern horde as legiti-
mate actors in the drama of the Indian past. Above all, that past lost
much of its excitement for the guardians thanks to the valorization
of a new temporality — that is, the everyday in historical discourse.
The outrageous novelty of all this — of plot, actor, and play — amount-
ed to a seismic shift threatening to undermine the very ground where
the old established historiography had its foundations secured for so
long. The threat was so seriously felt because of the paradigmatic
character of the project initiated by the youth. It was a project to ex-
pand the scope of historiography so that it could accommodate all of
the historicality of civil society for which the traditional represent-
ation of the colonial past had no room in it. No wonder it was seen as
a challenge to the statism entrenched in academic discourse and to
those incapable of breaking away from it.

The other feature of this new orientation that is equally remarkable
is its involvement with theory. It follows no doubt from the expansion
of scope we have just discussed. For the inclusion of civil society within

344 The Small Voice of History

that scope and the revision it calls for in our understanding of the state
in both its colonial and postcolonial incarnations demand a range of
thematization far beyond anything known to the older historiography.
And such thematization leads in its turn to questions never asked
before and styles of inquiry unfamiliar to the established methodologies.
Theory comes in here. The poverty of historiography has driven our
younger scholars to look elsewhere for help and they are finding it in
the theoretically more advanced social sciences such as economics,
politics, anthropology, linguistics, etc. Working in the 1970s on the
problem of peasant insurgency 1 came to realize how little use the exist-
ing body of historical writing was for my approach to the subject. A
thimbleful of liberal sympathy and a thin crust of oversimplified class
analysis were all that it had to offer. In order to probe deeper and for-
mulate a problematique adequate to the phenomenon I had to rely
seriously on social anthropology and structural linguistics — both
distinguished in those days by a high degree of theoretical sophistication.

I believe that the current interest in theory derives much in the same
way from want of confidence in a tired and outmoded scholarship and
a strongly felt need on the part of the younger generation to cope with
the increasingly difficult and extended demands of thematization.

Now thematization stands for a lateral spread as an urge that follows
the progress of curiosity from topic to topic, from one event or com-
plex of events to another. Theory helps this urge to find its objects,
investigate them by observation and analysis, and use the results for its
interpretation of the past. In this sense the function of theory in
historical thematization is not very different from that in the natural
sciences, except for one important respect. Unlike the natural sciences,
history has to be constantly on the watch to ensure that its soul, the
specificity of experience, is not destroyed by overarching generalizations
of the order of universal laws.

However, I feel that the current enthusiasm for theory cannot be
explained fully in terms of its objectivizing and analytical functions
alone. There is an intensity about it that makes sense only if we allow
language to guide us in our approach to the phenomenon. Theory, we
know, comes from theoria , an ancient Greek woid foi view or specula-
tion or whatever connotes looking ( speculare ). According to Gada-
mer, the idea of theoria was associated originally with that of sacral
communion, such as a festival or a dramatic performance, where an

345

Writing the Past Where Generations Meet

onlooker or theoros became a part of the show by virtue of his presence
there together with others.7 In this case, therefore, the relation of
spectator and spectacle was not anything like that of observer and
observed in a scientific approach to objects or occurrences in nature.
Understood thus, theory serves the historian not merely as an instrument
by which to grasp something outside of and neutral to ones self. On
the contrary, it is a measure of her participation in a shared past as
the very condition of her being in a community. Above all, theory
is witness to her effort to appropriate that past on behalf of her con-
temporaries by integrating it in what they regard as Our Time, and re-
presenting it in historical discourse. The interest in theory so pronounced
today testifies not only to the usefulness of its objective-scientific
function for the younger historians. It is significant also as an intimation
of their urge to define themselves in terms of a past they have made
their own in a difficult transaction with their elders.

1 welcome this youthful orientation. Its urge to open up the study
of India’s colonial past by a radically new thematization and add
new depth to it by theorization is for me unmistakable evidence of an
affirmation of life. A highly complex and critical process is at work
within it: it retains whatever it can creatively assimilate from the legacies
handed down by the older generations and replaces their moribund
elements by what belongs to the youth uniquely in its Own Time. All
of this adds up to a rejuvenation that has not come a day too soon. The
first modern Western-style work on Indian history in my language,
Ramram Basu s Raja Pratapaditya Caritra , was published in May 1 80 1 .
I mention this not only in acknowledgement of an ancestral debt, but
also to remind ourselves that two centuries is a long time to be stuck
in a groove. Once so helpful, it has got rusty by now. We could do with
a change. I see that change coming. This is a prospect that owes primarily
to the inventiveness and energy of the youth. I hail that prospect as an
aged historian nearing his end and hope in all humility that my thoughts
and sentiments addressed to this distinguished gathering of younger
scholars will be acceptable to them as a sincere tribute to their initiative
for a new beginning.

7 Hans-Gcorg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Crossroad, 1988),
pp. 110-11.

Subaltern Studies:
Projects for Our Time and
Their Convergence

When the first volume of Subaltern Studies , the serial named
after our project, was published in 1 982 in Delhi, we did not
count on any readership abroad. For throughout the long
period of colonial rule we were always represented by the coloniz-
ers and it is through them — their academics and other intellectuals,
their publications, and other media — that the West had come to know
about us. The fact that the colonized in the subcontinent had been
writing about themselves not only in their own languages but also in
English since the beginning of the nineteenth century made little
difference and the legacy of chat alien representation seemed destined
to continue even after decolonization. We had accepted this as a
sort of fate. It was therefore with a degree of genuine surprise and de-
light that I came to learn of the interest taken in our work by schol-
ars concerned with Latin American Studies in Latin America and
the USA. Some of them have done our project a singular honour
by allowing ir to take its place alongside theirs under a common
designation. It is gestures like these which, more than anything else,
make it possible for us to break out of our containment in two hundred
years of solitude. I am deeply moved and dedicate this lecture to my

Subaltern Studies: Projects 347

colleagues of the Latin American Subaltern Studies group as a token
of our solidarity. 1

Our project, Subaltern Studies, has its genesis in the South Asian
experience. Informed by the immediacy and urgency of the subconti-
nents political and social conditions, it identifies itself by such names,
thematizes itself according to such problems, chronicles itself in terms
of such events, and expresses itself in such sentiments as are all un-
mistakably South Asian. This may of course make one wonder whether
it is at all possible to make something so specific to the area compre-
hensible to those who do not belong there. Doesn’t the very concreteness
of its regionality make this project useless to scholars, such as Latin
Americanists, with no specialized interest in that part of the world? The
answer, I think, is no. For it is not territoriality that relates our project
to theirs in a bond of mutual relevance, but temporality.

Our project belongs to our time. It made its debut at a time of
turbulence marked by the difficulties facing India’s new nation state,
by acute civil disturbances which threatened occasionally to tear it
apart, by a common anxiety in which the frustration of the Midnight’s
Children born since Independence blended with the disillusionment
of older generations to produce an explosive discontent and so forth.
One could go on adding to this list. What is curious about it is that
not one of its items has only local time as its referent. In each instance
a when assigned to it within the Indian experience has a when’ corres-
ponding to it in a global register where phenomena of longer duration
designated as eras and ages (e.g. the age of superpower rivalry or the
electronic era) have been contemporaneous with a countless number
of relatively short-term events ranging from the Cuban missile crisis
and the Vietnam war to fluctuations in world commodity prices and
race riots in Britain. In other words, our time in the Subaltern Studies
project concerned with South Asia is one that has been thoroughly
overdetermined by global temporalities.

So, I guess, has been the time of the Latin American Subaltern
Studies project, a time it can legitimately call our time’ — as witness the

1 This essay is the full text of a lecture at a meeting of the Latin American
Subaltern Studies Collective at Rice University, Houston, Texas, October 1 996.

348

The Small Voice of History

periodization which provides the groups formation with a historical
background in its ‘Founding Statement* and the observation which
connects ‘the specific nature of [that] project* in the Introduction to
the anthology, Subaltern Studies in the Americas , to ‘such historical
and geographic determinants as the so-called demise of socialism after
the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1 989 and the loss of the elections by
Sandinistas in Nicaragua in 1990.*2

Such a collapsing of local and global times — the time of the Naxal-
bari uprising in India and that of the Cultural Revolution in China,
the time of the Nicaraguan elections and that of the fall of the Berlin
Wall — is of course one of the most salient features of capitals ‘self-
realization process’ ( Selbstverwertu ngsp rozess) in the course of which it
strives to annihilate space with time, as Marx has argued.3 Since this
process underlies all that has gone into the making of the modern age
as the age of capital, its intensification in our time is designated,
justifiably I think, as the condition of postmodernity in much the same
way as an aggravated phase acquires sometimes a special name in the
diagnosis of a prolonged illness. Which goes to show among other
things that the phenomenon of postmodernity stands no less for a
movement of capital than for a movement of ideas.

It is in this overarching temporality that ‘our time* with all its South
Asian specifications intersects with a distinctively Latin American ‘our
time*. And since comparison between any two terms requires a third
term in which both can be expressed, we have in this particular phase
of global temporality — call it postmodernity if you like — the ground
that should suffice for the comparability of these projects. However,
before proceeding any further in this direction it may be worth our
while to pause for a moment and consider whether the significance of
this intersection is grasped best by a comparative exercise. For the latter
often rends to degenerate into a sort of contestatory evaluation which
is as gratuitous as it is unhelpful for any genuine understanding of the
entities compared.

2 Jose Rabasa, Javier Sanjines, Robert Carr (cds), Subaltern Studies in the
Americas , special issue of Disposition , no. 46, 1 994 (published in 1996), p. vi.

* Karl Mane, Grundrisse , rrans. Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth: Penguin
Books, 1973), p. 539.

349

Subaltern Studies: Projects

Going by the evidence of numerous instances when our humble
project with no claim at all to universal validity has been summoned
to stand trial by comparison and found wanting as measure or model
for studies based on very different regional material, I have come to
doubt the value of such an approach. For it relies usually on the most
slender trace of an analogy here, a touch of resemblance there, and a
suggestion of parallelism in yet another respect to produce at best what
Wittgenstein has called the experience of comparison, indicating that
one is only ‘inclined towards a comparison*, that one is ‘[inclined] to
make a paraphrase.’4 There is nothing wrong with such inclination in
itself. However, it is not the same thing as comparison that combines
with reflection and abstraction to generate concepts in the process of
understanding.5 Yet this is not always kept in mind. On the contrary,
superficial inclination is too readily accorded the status of conceptual-
ization, allowing it to sit in judgement over works concerned with
widely disparate phenomena before thinking its way through to the
ground where these may be brought together for a proper consideration
of what is unique about each of them and what they share.

That ground, as we have already observed, is nothing other than
an overarching temporality subsuming local times. We shall try and
approach it not in a spirit of comparison and competition, but of con-
vergence. To converge is to tend to meet in a point as lines do in a figure
or to approximate like numbers do in a mathematical series towards
a given limit. Generally speaking, it is for one thing to incline towards
another in a specified direction and approach it closely enough to verge
on it. There is nothing in these meanings shown for the phrase in
the Concise Oxford Dictionary to impute to it any presupposition of
similarity or to tie it down to the notion of parity as in comparison. For
tendencies can be dissimilar and unequal in important respects and yet
share an orientation towards some horizon each can recognize as its
own. What is of crucial significance here is the dynamics of towardness

4 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1980), #316, and generally # 316-20.

5 For the concept forming functions of comparison, reflection, and abs-
traction, see Immanuel Kant, Logic , trans. Robert S. Harman and Wolfgang
Schwartz (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1974). pp. 100-1.

350 The Small Voice of History

with its characteristic movements of inclining, approaching, and
approximating. It is these which make it possible for drives, initiatives,
and ideas to coalesce without any of them compromising the identity
and originality of the projects to which they belong. There is room
enough in such coalescence for all such tendencies to come alongside
each other and let their borders touch in a lateral solidarity. None of
these has to race against any of the others. As neighbours they are free
to look over the fence, inspect each others gardens, engage in mutual
criticism, and do so, as befits good neighbours, without mutual anta-
gonism. Indeed, criticism, anchored in a convergence, will find all the
strength it needs to overcome petty jealousies and rancour which usurp
its place so often in academic discussion.

However, for any such solidarity to take effect in a convergence it
is essential that the ground for the latter is clearly delimited. How is
that to be done? There is no single formula to guide all tendencies in
dealing with that task in a uniform manner. For they differ in their
formulations, their inclinations, and their paths to convergence. I see
the delimiting done for our project by all those considerations which
the Latin Americanists and other scholars have brought to bear on our
writings. Which is to acknowledge straightaway that convergence
relies on reciprocity as the very condition of its possibility.

It is the interest taken in our work on South Asia by intellectuals
engaged in the study of other regions and within other tendencies
which alone enables us to reach out to them. All their questions ad-
dressed to us, all expressions of doubt or approval, all suggestions,
including even those which signal nothing more than the merest
experience of comparison , are indeed so many points where their
concerns touch ours. To join up those points of contact in an outline,
however irregular, broken and roughly sketched, would be to map out
a space for all ways of thinking on the problem of subalternity to gather
in a congress of critical exchange. That would make a rather large map,
no doubt, judging by the range and volume of discussions on Subal-
tern Studies amongst the Latin Americanists alone, not counting the
numerous interventions made by other regional specialists. I can’t
chart all that extensive territory in a talk of this length and must be
selective in my exploration of the delimited ground visiting, on this
occasion, only a few of its many interesting sites. I make no claim
however for my itinerary as either the best or the only possible one.

351

Subaltern Studies: Projects

Let us start with postmodernism. I choose this rather than any other
as my point of departure not only because our project has been drawn
into some of the recent debates amongst the Latin Americanists them-
selves on this problem, but also because of its timeliness. For one thing,
it highlights the intersection of our time with theirs. Furthermore, the
question ‘What is postmodernism?’ is timely in much the same way as
was that other question ‘What is enlightenment?" asked over two
centuries ago. That too was asked from within its own time as the
articulation of an actuality, of a present, a ‘now* to which the philoso-
pher, its contemporary, related as if to a predicament and was driven
by his doubts to inquire, ‘What is it that we call enlightenment? Where
does it come from and where is it taking us?’

The contemporaneity of Kant s essay ‘An Answer to the Question,
“‘What is Enlightenment?”", is fairly well documented in all its
circumstantial aspects. It was a partisan intervention published in
Berlinische Monatsschrifi , the principal organ of the Berlin school of
enlightenment philosophy with which he had allied himself. Joining
the battle of ideas against political and intellectual reaction in Prussia,
‘he had gathered up all the threads clustering around the name of this
party" in this article, says Ernst Cassirer, and endeavoured to define
their one most integrating tendency’ — namely, the conception of
autonomy.6

This local battle of so long ago and with so provincial an air about
it would have mattered little to us had it not been for the fact that its
challenge, ‘Have courage to use your own reason", has not spent its
force even today. To the contrary, it appears to have gained not merely
in urgency but also in complexity and scope. Of the many different
aspects of its continued importance there is at least one which bears
directly on our present discussion.

This concerns the question of autonomy, that is, what Kant calls
‘man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage", so that he can ‘make use
of his understanding without direction from another.’7 Insofar as such
direction had traditionally been the prerogative of institutional or

6 Ernst Cassirer, Kants Life and Thought trans. James Haden (New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 367.

7 Immanuel Kant, ‘What is Enlightenment", p. 3. This and all other refer-
ences to Kant’s essay ‘An Answer to the Question: “What is Enlightenment?””

352

The Small Voice of History

individual authorities exercised in the name of an age-old wisdom, to
rebel against it would be to assert the primacy of the present as a time
reclaimed from its assimilation to tutelary pasts and made entirely
ones own.

The moment of such self-assertion with humanity proclaiming the
autonomy of reason would be the moment of the critique, as Foucault
observes in a brilliant reading of this text.8 For it was only a critique that
could define the legitimate use of reason. ‘The critique’, according to
him, ‘is, in a sense, the handbook of reason that had grown up in
Enlightenment; and, conversely, the Enlightenment is the age of the
critique*. 9 He echoes in these words Kant’s own characterization of his
time in his preface to the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason ,
‘Our age is, in special degree, the age of criticism, and to criticism
everything must submit.’10

What, from our point of view, is important about that critique is its
function as a paradox. It heralds the advent of reason and upholds its
sovereignty and yet ends up by defining the limits of the latter. This is
nowhere more obvious than in the philosophers own attempt to re-
concile the freedom of political argument with an unquestioning obe-
dience to the enlightened despot, Frederick II of Prussia — an ingenuity
described by Foucault as ‘a sort of contract . . . the contract of rational
despotism with free reason.’11

The irony of this compromise does not lie in the contingencies of
political tact alone. It arises out of an iron necessity for reason to have
its universalist drive curbed by history — a point which seems not to

are to its translated version published under the title ‘What is Enlightenment,
in Immanuel Kanr, On History , ed. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis and New
York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), pp. 3-10.

8 Michel Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment*, in Paul Rabinow, ed., The
Foucault Reader (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984), pp. 32-50.

9 Ibid., p. 38.

10 Immanuel Kant, Immanuel Kants Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman
Kemp Smith (Houndmills and London: Macmillan, 1990), p. 9.

1 1 Foucault writes: ‘In the text on Aufkldrung [Kant] deals with the question
of contemporary reality alone. He is not seeking to understand the present on
the basis of a totality or of a future achievement*, in Foucault, ‘What is Enlight-
enment?’, op. cir., p. 34.

353

Subaltern Studies : Projects

have received the emphasis it merits in Foucaults overly actualist
reading of the text.1 2 He sees reason hurtling against insuperable limits
ever since its formation, but does not push the limit-attitude to the
point where the notion of progress itself comes under question. For it
is precisely there that human progress ‘must be connected to some ex-
perience’, according to Kant, much in the same way as a certain out-
come‘can . . . be predicted in general as in the calculation of probability
in games of chance’, although ‘that prediction cannot enable us to
know whether what is predicted is to happen in my life and I am to have
the experience of it.’ Progress still retains its place in this perspective
‘as an inevitable consequence’ but is left ‘undetermined with regard to
time’, that is, with regard to history which, as we know from Logic, is
another name for experience.13

These ideas elaborated by Kant in The Conflict of the Faculties
(1798) were already anticipated in his 1784 article in the form of a
cautionary statement thus: ‘If we are asked, “Do we now live in an
enlightened age?", the answer is, no, but we do live in an age of en-
lightenment.'^ Indeed this gesture of a gaze turning away from the
immediate present towards the still unexplored vistas of time helps
us to grasp the significance of the copula in the question, ‘What is
Enlightenment?’ For the ‘is’ has for its referent here, one can say fol-
lowing Heidegger, ‘not only the currently actual, which affects us
and which we stumble upon.’ It refers also to ‘the possible, which we
expect, hope for, and fear, which we only anticipate, before which we
recoil and yet do not let go.’15

With actuality projected thus on a horizon of possibility that
historic question would serve no purpose merely as a cue to some well-
rehearsed apology for reason. On the contrary, reason would henceforth

12 Ibid., p. 37.

13 ‘Empirical certainty is original ( originarie empirica) as fat as I am certain
of something^ww my own experience, and derivative as far as I become certain
of something through others’ experience. The latter is also commonly called
historical certainty : Kant, Logic , p. 78.

14 Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties , trans. Mary J. Gregor
(Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), p. 151.

15 Martin Heidegger, Basic Concepts , trans. Gary F. Aylesworth (Bloomington
and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 21.

354 The Small Voice of History

have all its certainties invested by an unremitting anxiety; and Enlighten-
ment, racked by self-doubt, a Pangloss haunted by an unhappy consci-
ousness, would herald an epoch for melancholy optimism characteristic
of all that modernity was to stand for.

The encounter between reason and experience which provoked the
Enlightenment’s interrogation of itself is also what enables us to ask
today ‘What is postmodernism:’ An echo of a sort, it is still by no
means an exact reproduction. No echo ever is. For the interval which
separates it from the original is also what reduces it to a mere fraction
of the latter constituting, thanks to Junos curse, a rather different
sound.16 Our question too has become unmistakably our own by
virtue of its deferral. It shares no doubt a distinctive ethos of criti-
cism with its eighteenth-century forebear, but differs so utterly from
the latter in manner and content that fears which have been expressed
about its role as a secret agent of high modernism are perhaps grossly
exaggerated.

For, in every serious contest with a critique that has ever belonged
to its own time since the Enlightenment, it is the claim of pure reason
which has taken a beating. Undetermined by the historicism of Herder
in the study of the human past, by romanticism in aesthetics, by Marx-
ism in political economy — to name only a few amongst a host of its
younger adversaries — it has been pursued relentlessly since its inception
by a critique which moves with time and corrodes it by the relativities
of an inexhaustible and always rechargeable cotemporaneity. If criticism
has not amounted to a revolutionary challenge in every instance of
such an engagement, it has still been unsettling enough to sustain and
intensify the constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted
disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agi-
tation, which ‘distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones’,
according to that other founding statement dated 1848. 17

The importance of this reflection on the ontology of capital and the
age named after it is haid to exaggerate. For it teaches us to valorize and

16 John Sallis, Echoes (Bloomington and Indiana; Indiana University Press,
1990), pp. 1-14.

17 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works (London: Lawrence and
Wishart, 1976), voL 6, p. 487.

355

Subaltern Studies: Projects

cherish any critique whatsoever that contributes to this process of
constant revolutionizing, uninterrupted disturbance’, and ‘everlasting
uncertainty’. Whether such a critique is oriented or not towards a
utopia of ultimate liberation, I don’t see how it can be denied a place
on the agenda for changing the world for those who still believe in
doing so. It should therefore be radical enough for us if only because
it does not allow reason to forget the pain of that historic carbuncle
which, metaphorically speaking, could stimulate such thoughts even
in an age of unquestioning faith in the inevitability of progress.

I am quite happy therefore to have postmodernism as the ground
of our convergence. In that ground we — that is, projects called Subal-
tern Studies and others with different names but similar orientations —
come together with concerns which are specific to our time. Our
time is, in this context, the time of our being with others in the world.
Insofar as the latter is local as well as global, to converge implies our
being alongside others in an extended world and seeing ourselves in the
light emitted by them. It is a light that illuminates differences be-
tween regional experiences no less than their agreements. Consequently,
the specificity of each converging instance is spelt out in such cases
as a narrative plotted in its own time, as witness the ‘Introduction’ to
the special issue of Boundary 2 called The Postmodernism Debate in
Latin America vAxerc temporal markers of the Latin American engage-
ment with postmodernism are displayed clearly enough to make it
stand well apart from similar engagements such as the Anglo-European
and South Asian ones.

The latter is of course easily recognized by its temporality designated
as postcolonial. It indicates the path we have taken to the convergence.
A part of that trajectory merges with postmodernism, but does so
without losing its identity as one that has been trodden by a two-hund-
red-year-long colonial occupation. In what sense does that experience
lead our project to take its stand alongside other postmodernist criti-
ques? For an answer one could consider that experience in the light of
three salient aspects of modernity’s intersection wirh colonialism
which, stated briefly, are as follows: first, that the phenomenon ofpost-
Enlightenment colonialism is constitutive of and presupposed in
modernity even though it is not always explicitly acknowledged to be
so; secondly, that postmodernism as a critique can never be adequate

356

The Small Voice of History

to itself unless it takes colonialism into account as a historic barrier that
reason can never cross; and thirdly, that the colonial experience has
outlived decolonization and continues to be related significantly to the
concerns of our own time.

Of the numerous questions which could arise from the colonial
experience connecting thus with modernity there was one that assumed
a good deal of urgency for us in the 1 970s. It was a question about the
structure of politics under colonial rule on which much had already
been written during the Raj and since Independence by nationalism
and neo-colonialist academics in India and abroad. The domain of
politics was conceptualized in this vast literature invariably as one that
was unitary and undifferentiated. All schools of thought appeared to
have been bound by a tacit agreement on this issue in spite of their
differences on other matters as colonialists, nationalists, Marxists,
or whatever.

We, on our part, came up with an answer radically opposed to the
dominant view. The domain of politics in colonial India, we argued,
was structurally split. To interpret it as homogeneous was elitist and
unhistorical. ‘For parallel to the domain of elite politics , we said in an
inaugural statement, ‘there existed throughout the colonial period
another domain of Indian politics in which the principal actors were
not the dominant groups of the indigenous society or the colonial
authorities but the subaltern classes and groups constituting the mass
of the labouring population and the intermediate strata in town and
country — that is, the people. This was an autonomous domain, for it
neither originated from elite politics nor did its existence depend on
the latter.’18

That insight has been of foundational importance for our project.
Everything which distinguishes it from all other positions within
South Asian Studies follows from this thesis. It informs the entire range
of our work in many different aspects of history, politics, and culture,
much ofwhich is ofcouise regionally specific. However, such regionality
does not take away from the relevance of that thesis for a more general
postmodernist critique, which is where we join up with other pro-
jects and tendencies. On the contrary, it helps to emphasize what is

18 Ranajit Guha, cd., Subaltern Studies I (Delhi: Oxford University Press,

1982), p. 4.

357

Subaltern Studies: Projects

uniquely South Asian and postcolonial in our approach. This can be
demonstrated by a review of the conditions that made it possible for
the elite to be so blind towards the structural split in the domain of
politics and regard the latter as unitary.

One of those conditions was based entirely on the idea that there
was nothing to politics apart from what concerned the state, and since
all that concerned the colonial state in South Asia was a matter of trans-
actions between the colonial and indigenous elites, there was no
politics other than elite politics. Defined in terms of this double ex-
clusion— that is, the exclusion of whatever was non-governmental
and non-elite — from the realm of politics, the latter could indeed be
considered as an integral and undifferentiated space. As such, it could
serve for a secure, if narrow, base to an autocracy dependent entire-
ly on the collaboration of a minority of dominant elements for its
survival. Since the colonial regime in South Asia was in all important
respects precisely such an autocracy, it would have no use for a political
domain that was structurally split.

However, the image the Raj liked to project of itself was far from
that of a narrowly based autocracy It claimed to rule by the consent of
the subject population. The theme of loyalty was prominendy displayed
in all its official policies and institutions and used as an exorcising
mantra against the spectre of nationalist opposition during the last
fifty years or so of its career. Mountains have indeed been made of
moles of native collaboration in all kinds of colonial discourse ranging
from the crude official propaganda of the First World War to the more
sophisticated histories produced by neocolonialist scholars since the
Second World War. The non-antagonistic relationship of colonizer
and colonized presumed in such discourse requires the elitist view of
power to postulate an integrated and unified politics and persist in its
blindness towards the structural split in that domain.

It has been up to us, following the logic of our insight, to expose the
hollowness of this presumption. We have traced the latter to its source
in the colonial state s desire to model itself on the liberal bourgeois state
of metropolitan Britain, the Mother of Parliaments, the worlds first
and foremost democracy. What however the Raj for all its emulation
ended up with was tawdry caricature. An autocracy eager to pass itself
as a rule of law, a state without citizenship trying unsuccessfully to
legitimize itself by the approval of its disenfranchized subjects, a

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The Small Voice of History

master craving desperately for the bondsmans love, the Raj with the
moment of consent outweighed by that of coercion in the organic
composition of its power, was a dominance without hegemony.19

The colonial state in South Asia, we have argued, stood thus for a
historic failure of reason. There was nothing in its record to justify the
latter s promise of a steady progress towards the happiness of all man-
kind. Neither capital nor liberalism, the twin engines of reason, proved
powerful enough to overcome local resistance in the subcontinents
indigenous economy and culture. Colonialism in South Asia gives the
lie therefore to the universalist pretensions of reason. This I believe is
the essence of a postcolonial critique as it developed in our work. It
goes to show how that critique overflows the boundaries of mere
regional experience to converge with all the other currents of postcolonial
and postmodern thinking on the question, ‘What is Enlightenment?’

We have adapted that question for our own time effectively by drop-
ping the sign of interrogation and setting it up as Hn affirmative sedi-
mented by two hundred years of doubt and ready for translation
into a new interrogative, ‘What is postmodernism?’ as Lyotard has
formulated it for us.20 It confronts us today with a host of other ques-
tions which have been waiting until now to be asked. One of these,
related directly to the postcolonial condition, must be heard at once:
How is our critique going to be adequate to our time if it continues to speak
in the language of those post-Enlightenment critiques whose time is gone*

Those critiques too had contested reason in their own different
ways and shown how it had compromised its principles in its colonial
project. The tolerance of autocracy in Europe’s overseas empires in an
age when new republics were replacing the older absolutist states
nearer home; the narrowly Eurocentric character of her so-called
civilizing missions operating in the other continents; the promo-
tion of white supremacist ideas and practices by the Western imperial

19Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in
Colonial India (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).

20 Jean-Francois Lyotard, ‘Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?*,
in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge , trans. Geoff Benning-
ton and Brian Masumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987),

pp. 71-82.

359

Subaltern Studies: Projects

agencies in their colonies blatantly contradicting the ideals of equality
and fraternity professed, if not fully achieved, by the metropolitan
governments — have all been cited again and again as evidence of the
non-universality of reason in its career abroad. Indeed, it was liberals
firmly committed to reason themselves who were the first to join issue
thus with reason and they came from both sides of the colonial divide,
from the colonizing as well as the subject nations — Tagore and Gandhi
amongst the latter.

The range and power of that critique cannot be overestimated.
Yet as a critique of reason circumscribed by the statism inherent in
reason itself its adequacy for our own time is far from clear. For the state
trusted by reason to serve as the vehicle for human progress is left
unquestioned not only in the classical political philosophy of the
Enlightenment, but even in the more interventionist of rationalist
theories such as the utilitarian and the socialist. The failure of colo-
nialism to live up to that progressivist agenda has been interpreted even
by the severest of liberal critics either as an instance of bureaucratic
lapse remedied easily by measures of improvement and efficiency in
the administration of the regimes concerned, or just as a case of colo-
nizers being unreasonable in their opposition to the colonized peoples'
demand for self-determination — which, once conceded, would solve
all problems by converting colonial states into sovereign nation-states.
The latter continue thus to inspire the same sort of faith as did that
historic ‘Even; of our Time’, Kants name for the French Revolution,
when he celebrated it as the demonstration of a universal moral
tendency of the human race5, 21 not only in its predisposition to hope
for progress but also in its ability to achieve it.

That faith has lost the freshness of dawn by now and curdled into
a dogma. It takes the universality of reason for granted in statehood
even where the latter is conspicuous for its contingency and particularity,
as it was in India under British rule. The colonial state there did not
arise out of the indigenous society but was foisted on it by conquest
and condemned to live in utter isolation. A dominance without hege-
mony, it never succeeded in penetrating the civil society of the subject
population deeply enough to absorb it to itself. Consequendy, there

21 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason , op. cit., p. 153.

360

The Small Voice of History

were vast areas of the South Asian experience which remained beyond
the reach of governmental apparatus and the range of official vision.
Yet such inaccessibility of society to state, which gave colonialism its
distinctive character, failed to register in the discourse of reason either
as a matter of fact or as a phenomenon to be apprehended by theory.
This becomes obvious when one considers the writing of history as
an instance of rationalist discourse par excellence. It would be no
exaggeration to say that all the major tendencies of Indian historio-
graphy— colonialist, nationalist, and Marxist — have been seriously
afflicted by statism entrenched so well in the post-Enlightenment
critique of reason. The primacy of the state in the histories they pro-
duced left no room in them for the complexity, diversity, and multi-
tude of experience located within the still unassimilated parts of civil
society. The result has been to leave unheard a myriad stories in the life
of our people and deny them the historicality to which they are fully
entitled.22

Our project calls upon us to unshackle the critique of reason from
its tutelage to statism. For no state, even the sovereign nation-state
which was so dynamic two hundred years ago, when the world was still
young, can be trusted ro act as an unstoppable engine of progress today.
Indeed, the new states, which emerged after the Second World War out
of the old colonial empires under the rulership of indigenous elites,
have in most cases still a long way to go before they can claim ro have
their dominance endowed with hegemony. They rely a great deal on
the authority of elitist discourse and its philosophical, methodological,
and narratological strategies to sustain and propagate the statist
ideologies which they need to keep themselves in power. It is for us
to stand up to that authority and enable the small and silenced voice
of history — the subaltern voice — to be heard again. That is no mean
challenge. The convergence of the South Asian and Latin American
Subaltern Studies projects and other such initiatives gives me the cour-
age to believe that the time for such a challenge has come.

22 For some discussion on this question, see Ranajit Guha, ‘The Small Voice
of History’, Subaltern Studies IX , ed. Shahid Amin and Dipesh Chakrabarty
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. I -12: reproduced in the present
book.

Gramsci in India: Homage to
a Teacher

The Gramsci Foundation has done me an honour by inviting
me to speak on Gramscis influence in India. I can do so
only as a student paying homage to a teacher. For that is how
he stands in relation to us who were involved in designing and setting
up our project, Subaltern Studies. Influence works in such a relation
as a two-way process with both sides actively joining in. That is why
a good lesson benefits the student who co-operates, but falls flat on one
who doesn’t. Influence, in this respect, is a bit like what biologists call
adaptation. Gramsci himself uses the term as a metaphor when he
argues that continuity can create a healthy tradition if the people
can be actively involved in what he describes as an organic develop-
ment’. This process is, in his view, a problem of education of the
masses, of their “adaptation” in accordance with the requirements of
the goal to be achieved.’ In the life-sciences adaptation was once
considered to be a providential phenomenon limited strictly to some
ecosystems according to a preordained scheme. Since Darwin, however,
it has been acknowledged as an entirely random process in which an
organism adapts itself contingently wherever it has the best chance to
survive and reproduce.

Copyright © 2007 Ranajit Guha. Unpublished lecture first read in absentia
at a conference of the Gramsci Foundation in Rome, April 2007. All cita-
tions of Gramsci s writings in this text have been taken from Antonio Gramsci,
Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci edited and translated
by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Noel Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishart,
1971).

362 The Small Voice of History

Indeed, it is contingency that alone can explain why Gramsci’s
thought has flourished somewhat better in far-off lands than in its
native continent. Even in India, for all its success, it did not take root
where one might have expected it to do, but in an altogether different
sector of South Asian life. In fact, it defied all predictability by choos-
ing an academic project like Subaltern Studies rather than the two
official communist parties as its seedbed and propagator. And to add
yet another twist to the irony, it so happened that the project was not
even sited in the subcontinent even though it was thoroughly Indian
in spirit and scope.

In our urge to learn from Gramsci we were entirely on our own and
owed nothing to the mainstream communist parties. They had split
up in 1 964 to form the Communist Party of India (CPI) and the Com-
munist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI[M]) indicating respectively a
Moscow-oriented tendency in one and a more radical Beijing-oriented
tendency in the other. Neither had any use for Gramsci in their policies
and programmes. Indeed his name was practically unknown to their
rank and file members and there is no evidence to show that their lead-
ers took much notice of his life and work until 1 964. At that time some
intellectuals on the fringe of the smaller and weaker CPI took an inte-
rest in Gramscian thought but with little consequence for the Moscow-
line policies and programmes of their party.

Our project, Subaltern Studies, kept itself at a distance from both
CPI and CPI(M) . To us, both represented a left-liberal extension of the
Indian power elite itself. It was not that we were non-political or anti-
communist. To the contrary, we considered ourselves as Marxists in
our attempt to develop a radical critique of colonialism and colonialist
knowledge in the study of South Asian history and society. We, there-
fore, opposed both the official com m unist parties for their opportunistic
and dogmatic use of Marxism. Our sympathies were with the mili-
tant peasant movement that drew its inspiration from the Chinese re-
volution and the ideas of Mao Zedong. Known as the Naxal movement
(Naxalbari being the rural district where it had originated), it was
crushed by the combined efforts of the Congress and the two commun-
ist parties in vicious counter-insurgency operations during 1968-71.
Defeated as it was organizationally, the movement still left a vast legacy
of doubt and questioning. Since the 1 970s that legacy has been creat-
ively used by Indian intellectuals in many fields, including literature

363

Gramsci in India : Homage to a Teacher

and the performing arts as well as history and the social sciences. Our
project Subaltern Studies is widely acknowledged as a leading force
within that broad intellectual formation.

What made the Naxal movement so powerful in its short-lived
career was a countrywide discontent about the political set-up in the
new Indian republic to which power was transferred when the British
finally quit in 1947. The catastrophes of the 1940s — the war, the
famine, the partition of the subcontinent into two sovereign stares
resulting in the displacement of hundreds of thousands of refugees,
and a sectarian strife that has earned historic notoriety for mass rape
of women and mass slaughter on a scale without parallel in this part
of the world — all this had an impact from which people continued to
suffer for decades even after Independence. The rural and urban poor,
including the impoverished middle classes, had expected the newly
formed government of Independent India to bring them relief. But
the ruling elite represented by the Congress Party was far too busy
consolidating its grip over the estate it had inherited from the British.
It took for granted the consent of the people who had constituted the
non-violent armies of the nation in an ti-i mperialist struggles, campaign
after campaign, since the beginning of the twentieth century. But
when the colonial masters were forced to leave and nearly two hundred
years of foreign occupation ended at last, the demobbed legions were
forgotten as the generals turned immediately to the task of manipulating
the state apparatus in order to secure the interests of the classes and
communities they represented. Initially, the communists and some of
the other political groups on the left sought to resist this process, but
without much success. The dominant elite broke up the resistance
by a generous use of the army, police, and draconian laws, and then
persuaded its critics to be content with their role as a parliamentary
opposition.

The trick worked, but not well enough to silence the growing op-
position outside the legislative chambers. By the late 1960s the misery
of the poor and the unemployed had driven them to such desperation
as to require only a spark to set it ablaze. The Naxalbari peasant move-
ment provided that spark. It started merely as a local uprising against
landloids, but soon became the signal for small-scale insurgencies in
some other rural parts as well. No less significant is the fact that it
spread to urban areas too.

364 The Small Voice of History

The power of this movement derived from the confluence of two
generational currents of disillusionment with India’s ruling elite and
the dominant elements throughout society, that is, against authority
everywhere. The older generation was disillusioned because the rulers
had failed to live up to the promises about a happier future by which
they, as leaders of the nationalist movement, had mobilized the masses
in the struggle for independence. The younger generation was disillus-
ioned because the parties, governments, and indeed all institutions
ranging from village councils and city halls to schools and factories,
where older men and women were in authority, had failed to ensure the
youth a future less bleak than the past in which they had grown up as
children.

This twofold generational discontent energized Subaltern Studies
asftvell. In the editorial team, made up of the principal contributors to
the serial published in that name, 1 represented the older generation
and the others the younger, all of them junior to me by at least twenty-
five years. I mention this ontological detail to indicate that our project
was an organic part of its life and times, a participant in the world to
which it belonged, and not just a detached academic observation post.
A child of experience educated in theory, it was emphatically political,
something that shocked the academic establishment which had been
the custodian of South Asian Studies both in England and India since
the nineteenth century.

We started working together in the mid-1970s when the Naxalite
upsurge had clearly subsided, although the questions it had provoked
were still unanswered. We sought to situate these questions in the
context of the colonial past. For, the end of colonial rule had done
nothing to replace or substantially alter the main apparatus of colonial
domination — that is, the state. It was transferred intact to the succes-
sor regime Consequently, when power was handed over to the Indian
rulers and yet the misery experienced under the previous regime con-
tinued undiminished under the new, the predicament of the present
referred directly back to the immediate past. Thanks to this linkage,
a vast space was opened up to allow our questions and concerns to
crystallize around the overlapping themes of state and civil society. In
both, Gramscis lessons were of invaluable help to us. However, in
order to benefit from these we had to adapt them to the Indian experi-
ence which was, of course, significantly different in many ways from

Gramsci in India: Homage to a Teacher 365

the Italian and generally, the Western experience on which Gramsci s
own thinking was based.

To start with the state, our questioning sprang from what puzzled
many observers in the early years of the republic. Why, they asked, did
the new rulers maintain such a distance from the people who had been
so close to them during the long period of the anti-colonial mass
movement that brought them to power. How very similar this appeared
to be to the distance which separated the colonized and the colonizer
in the days of foreign occupation! We, on our part, used this popu-
lar and widespread perception as a cue to probe the nature of this
alienation to inquire, at a deeper level, whether there was something
common between the two states — the colonial and the sovereign-
national — that might explain the phenomenon. In our effort to un-
derstand it we relied on the Hegelian master— servant dialectic and the
Gramscian theory of hegemony.

The colonial state in South Asia was acquired by the British not by
the consent of the indigenous people, but by force. Colonialism was,
in fact, a 190-year-long foreign occupation based entirely on the so-
called ‘right of conquest. But nothing is sweeter for the master than the
servants love. And the British were astute enough to try and combine
love with fear. However, as the Centaur had advised the Prince so long
ago. Because it is difficult to combine them, it is far better to be feared
than loved if you cannot be both.’ The British learnt from experience
how difficult indeed it was to be both in a country where they were just
an occupying power. So they settled for fear as the fundamental
governing principle of colonialism. Yet, they realized that a certain
amount of native support was essential if they had to consolidate their
rule. They used various means, ideological as well as material, to persuade
the Indian elite in favour of the regime, the Raj as it was called, and suc-
ceeded well enough to make it last for nearly two centuries. This is not
a matter of surprise, of course, considering that even in Iraq, a land so
utterly devastated by the brutalities of an occupying force, collaborators
have not been wanting. The task we set ourselves was to arrange the
particular moments of this complex relationship in a general configu-
ration of power.

In South Asian history of the colonial period, power stands for a
series of inequalities not only between the British conquerors and their
Indian subjects, but also between the dominant and the dominated in

366 The Small Voice of History

terms of class, caste, gender, age, and so forth in the hierarchies of the
indigenous society. These unequal relationships with all their diversities
and permutations derive from a general relation of Dominance and
Subordination. Since these two terms imply each other, they enable us
to conceptualize the historical articulation of power in all its aspects
as an interaction of Dominance and Subordination. Each of these, in
its turn, function within the overaiching frame as an entity constituted
by a pair of mutually determining elements — Dominance by Coercion
and Persuasion, and Subordination by Collaboration and Resistance.
However, there is a basic asymmetry underlying this two-level structure.
For the mutuality of Dominance and Subordination is logical and
universal, for it obtains in all kinds of unequal power relations every-
where at all times. But the same is not true for their constitutive pairs
which imply each other only under given conditions, that is, contin-
gently. As such, it is these, rather than the abstractions Dominance and
Subordination, which concretely express the dynamism of historical
experience in all its flow and flux. For it is precisely these constituents
of Dominance and Subordination that distribute their moments in
various combinations to distinguish one society from another and one
event from another according to the specificities of power relations
characteristic of each.

We have described such relativities, after Marx, as the organic com-
position of Dominance and Subordination. Just as the character of any
fund of capital — its capacity to reproduce and expand itself — and its
difference from any other fund depend in these respects on its organic
composition, that is, on the weight of its constant part relative to that
of its variable part, so does the character of Dominance and Subord-
ination, interacting in any particular instance, depend on the relative
weigh tage of the elements Coercion and Persuasion in Dominance and
of Resistance and Collaboration in Subordination — in other words,
on the organic composition of that power relation. Considered thus,
hegemony stands for a particular condition of Dominance, such that
the organic composition of Dominance enables Persuasion to outweigh
Coercion. This makes hegemony a dynamic concept that keeps even
the most persuasive structure of Dominance always and necessarily
open to Resistance in our project. It helps us at the same time to avoid

Gramsci in India: Homage to a Teacher 367

certain ambiguities in Gramsci s own use, as pointed out by the editor
of the English version of the Prison Notebooks.

The reason why we have to remove all ambiguities from the notion
of hegemony, in order to get the best out of it, is that any understanding
of the Indian experience requires a clear distinction between Persuasion
and Coercion as the principal constituent elements of Dominance.
For it is precisely the fuzzy space between these two that liberal'
imperialism exploited with all its cunning to lure liberal-nationalism
into Collaboration. In other words, the blurring of the distinction was,
for the imperialists, the very condition for the possibility of acquiring
hegemony over the conquered and colonized population. The history
of the period is full of instances of how Indian liberalism initially
succumbed to this ruse and then freed itself. I shall cite only one of
these here.

Gandhi was, for a long time, firm and uncompromising in his faith
in the goodness of the British empire. In fact, he proudly flaunts his
loyalism in his early political writings. However, something happened
in 1919 to make him radically change his opinion. In April that year
troops led by a British general of the Indian army gunned down a mass
of peasants who had gathered at a country fair on the occasion of the
harvest festival. The general justified his order to the troops to open fire
by saying that the crowd had been given a very short notice to leave the
park where they assembled, but was not quick enough. This was ac-
cepted as an adequate and satisfactory explanation for his savagery
both by the colonial authorities in India and by the British government
in England. He was praised for his services by the British Parliament
and honoured by the British public as a hero when he retired.

That was the signal for Gandhi, the committed loyalist, to turn his
back on Collaboration and take to Resistance. He explained this
change by saying that until 1 9 1 9 he had trusted the Raj to be a rule of
law, but the events of that spring proved him wrong and showed up the
colonial government as a Satanic regime. What is significant here is
that it took a massacre of the innocent to convert a collaborator into
an implacable foe of imperialism. Clearly, he, like many other liberal-
nationalists, was duped by colonialist ideology and its educational and
other apparatus to mistake an alien autocracy for a rule of law. They

368

The Small Voice of History

forgot that a rule of law would require the equality of all in the eye of
the law as its sine qua non , and that nothing less than a democratic state
could guarantee such equality for all its citizens.

However, the British colonial state in South Asia was the very re-
verse of democracy. It was an autocracy, a state that had no citizens, but
only subjects — a dominance without hegemony, as we have defined it.
It was a measure of the success of impci ial policy that it had managed
so well to hide this elementary truth even from the most enlighten-
ed Indian liberals for so long. When the velvet gloves were taken off,
suddenly exposing the iron fists, the victims woke up from the trance
to realize that in a land occupied, exploited, and ruled by a modern
imperialist power the only equality recognized by the rulers was the
common subalternity of the entire people subjugated by it. The liberal-
nationalists, on their part, used this very common subalternity to
mobilize the people in an anti-imperialist struggle under Gandhis
leadership. He insisted on keeping this struggle absolutely united
and opposed to any form of class conflict which he considered to be
divisive.

How come, then, that this common subalternity did not suffice as
a preventive for the countrywide outbreak of discontent after the
nationalist leadership came to power? The reason is that for ages before
the advent of colonialism and the birth of nationalism India had been
a country riven by many-sided divisions between subaltern and elite
in civil society. Embodied in the hierarchies of caste and class, in
gender and generational relations, and so forth, these had survived
most of the sporadic efforts at reform within the indigenous society
itself. Reformist projects initiated by some of the earlier colonial
administrators and Christian missionaries did not go far enough.
The Piedmont analogy used by Gramsci for reforms introduced by
conquerors in parts of Europe had no South Asian parallel. There the
unity achieved in the common front of national struggle against im-
perialism fell apart as soon as foreign occupation ended and the
nationalist elite acceded to rulership.

After the transfer of power the old traditional divisions not only
surfaced again, but did so even more vigorously than before in some
instances as the dominant groups paraded their newly acquired
importance and the subordinate ones sulked in resentment. In other

369

Gramsci in India: Homage to a Teacher

words, to exemplify yet another adaptation of a Gramscian lesson in
the light of Indian experience, the leadership that had been empowered
by the consent of the people in the movement for independence failed
to invest that consent into a hegemony as leaders of the new sovereign
state. Just as the autocracy — a dominance without hegemony — set
up by the most advanced parliamentary democracy of Europe as its
subcontinental colony proved to be an exception to the Western series
of hegemonic nation-states, so also did the new Indian nation-state
demonstrate that anticipation of power in a struggle based on popular
consent might not convert automatically into a hegemony for its
leadership even if it grasped state power. Hegemony in South Asia was
clearly discontinuous in this respect, for it had to be earned by the
leaders of the national anti-imperialist movement all over again in the
course of the ensuing process of a different kind of state formation.

In the Indian case the root of such discontinuity lay in the nature
of the mobilization itself. We, in our project, have gone carefully into
this question to discover, in detail, the braiding of two categorically
different types of mobilization in the nationalist movement led by
Gandhi and his party, the Indian National Congress. The elite stream,
organized meticulously by Gandhi and institutionalized in a modern
parliamentary fashion, was highly disciplined. Discipline was indeed
the key Gandhi used to build up this organization. Based on ideologically
committed cadres trained by him and his closest associates, it was
governed by rules he laid down himself. Compared to this, the other
stream was made up of the vast masses who gave nationalist mobilization
its volume and its energy. The form in which such mass mobilization
often featured in the nationalist campaigns was explicitly unparlia-
mentary and pre-modern in the sense of being part of a tradition going
back to the time before the advent of modernity.

The idioms that characterized it even in urban gatherings and
marches were those of country fairs and harvest festivals, of communal
fishing and hunting, of collective labour undertaken by peasants on
each others fields as neighbours and kinsfolk. This stream was thus
unmistakably subaltern in articulation and organization. From the
point of view of the elite nationalist leaders, however, it was much too
spontaneous and not organized enough for their purposes. They re-
garded it with suspicion and publicly dissociated themselves from

370

The Small Voice of History

such subaltern mobilization whenever it exceeded the limits imposed
by the elite. Much of the drama of Gandhian mobilization consisted
of his decision to abruptly terminate some of the ongoing united
popular movements precisely at such junctures on disciplinary grounds.
This structural split between the elite and subaltern streams of mobil-
ization was what made ir impossible for the nationalist leaders to pick
up the full measure of popular consent for the construction of hege-
mony after their accession to power. Sixty years after Independence
they are still working at it.

The dichotomy of nationalist mobilization was only a symptom of
Indian politics and generally of Indian life itself. There was a faultline
that cut across the entire society. The identification of this basic
structural split in terms of empirical research and its conceptualization
in theory was what gave Subaltern Studies its place in South Asian
scholarship, and perhaps in studies relating to some other societies and
cultures that share our experience. Gramsci has been our guide in this
important aspect of our project. We have taken from him some key
words and ideas. But what has made it possible for us to benefit from
these is their adaptability to the Indian condition. There is an openness
in his thinking that invites and encourages adaptation.

I consider it as perhaps the most influential and outstanding feature
of his thought. In his reading of Machiavelli he himself recognizes such
openness as an unmistakable sign of strength. In the very first sentence
of The Modem Prince he writes, ‘The basic thing about The Prince is
that it is not a systematic treatment, but a live work/ This is true of his
own work as well. Unlike some system builders he allows his readers
a great deal of freedom to think, absorb and make his ideas their own.
The editor of the English version of Prison Notebooks has expressed his
sense of discomfort at what he calls the unfinished and fragmentary
character of its contents. We have no problem with this at all. To the
contrary, this might have been his way of telling us that every project
is necessarily unfinished and the work must go on. Our humble project
Subaltern Studies has only begun its work and there’s a long way to go.

PART III

The Two Histories of
Empire

A Conquest Foretold

For years we could not talk about anything else. Our daily conduct,
dominated then by so many linear habits, had suddenly begun to
spin around a single common anxiety. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez,
Chronicle of a Death Foretold

A Small Victory Called Conquest

Whenever I read or hear the phrase colonial India , it hurts
me. It hurts like an injury that has healed and yet has retained
somehow a trace of the original pain linked to many different
things — memories, values, sentiments. For pain, says Wittgenstein, ‘is
characterized by very definite connections.’ The phrase he uses here
in the German original is in fact more inclusive than mere connections:
Zusammenhange. What it connotes is not only linkages, but also a
sort of aggregation of the linked entities to form a loosely gathered
context.1 The context of the pain that niggles us, shadows every refe-
rence to us as the colonized or once colonized, is part of a legacy that
dates back to the early years of British rule in South Asia and was passed
on, through successive generations, eventually to us whose passage
from infancy to youth coincided with the last two decades of the Raj.
The turmoil and sensitivities of that difficult transition not only added

1 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, ed. Georg
Henrik von Wright and Heikki Nyman, trans. C.G. Luckhardt and M.AE.
Aue (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), vol. 2, p. 150.

374 The Small Voice of History

to the intensity of the pain but taught us at the same time to con-
textualize it in history.

We learned, for instance, to trace it back to its source in an event
which had come, by this time, to epitomize the British conquest of
India. That event was the battle of Plassey, fought between the Nawab
of Bengal and the English East India Company, in which the latter
won a decisive victory on 23 June 1757. As an armed conflict, it was
a relatively minor affair- —less of a Waterloo than one of those regional
clashes in which Europe's mercantile operations in South Asia had
been routinely involved since the seventeenth century. It impresses us,
in retrospect, not so much for its military outcome brought about by
a pre-arranged defection of the Nawab s commander-in-chief as for its
foundational importance in the history of conquest. For India was not
conquered in a nine-hour battle on one single day.2 Even the Company’s
acquisition of Bengal, which was to prepare the ground for its further
expansion, had to wait another seven years for the battle of Buxar
(1764) and the grant of Diwani (1765) before it could be said to
have emerged finally as victor and ruler in a corner of eastern India. In-
deed, it would take nearly one hundred more years of war, intrigue, and
piecemeal annexation — region by region and often locality by locality —
for conquest to be consummated in British paramountcy over the
subcontinent as a whole.

Yet a conquest was already foretold in the first colonial histories pro-
duced within less than two decades of the victory at Plassey. The
victory, it was claimed, had invested the company with a sort of right,
designated somewhat hastily as a ‘right of arms’. As Alexander Dow,
a near contemporary of that event and one of the first colonial histor-
ians, was to write in his monumental work, The History ofHindostan ,
‘T he provinces of Bengal and Behar are possessed by the British East
India Company, in reality by the right of arms, though in appear-
anceby a grant from the present emperor.*3 The ‘reality* invoked in
this observation, dated 1 772, was precisely what guided the so-called

2 See Jadunath Sarkar, The History of Bengal, vol. 2 (Dacca: University of
Dacca, 1948), pp. 485-95. for whar still remains the most authoritative
account of the battle of Plassey and the circumstances that led to it.

3 Cited in Ranajit Guha. A Rule of Property for Bengal (Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press, 1996), pp. 25-6, where this question is discussed at some
length; emphasis added.

375

A Conquest Foretold

founders — that is, the first generation of the Company’s officials who
gave its mercantile-militarist apparatus the semblance of a civilian
administration — in their approach to the question of power. Warren
Hastings spoke for all of them when he characterized ‘the sword which
gave us the dominion of Bengal’ as a ‘natural charter.4

Statements such as these registered all too explicidy the buccaneer’s
faith in his sword. He relied on the sword to cut through the constitu-
tion of a well-established Asian monarchy and to deal with a fiscal
grant of three large and fertile provinces as a mere appearance’. It was
not the Mughal emperor but brute force that, he believed, ‘gave’ the
victors ‘the dominion of Bengal’ — a gift which owed little to political
arrangements and issued direcrly from the belief that mans violence
against fellow human beings was natural’. One more step and conquest
would be consecrated as predestination and providence would take
over from both man and nature.

However, a closer look should make it clear that there was more to
all this than a simple-minded brutality striving for mystical effect. For
a buccaneer’s sword requires no right or charter to justify it. It takes its
stand on an instant of quintessential aggression, that is, on an abso-
lute present, and has little use for futurity ex post facto. By contrast, a
charter always looks ahead and derives its validity from the entitlement
it confers on its beneficiaries for rights to be enjoyed in time to come.
The conquistador must, therefore, move forward from the Augenblick
of his flashing sword to history, from instantaneous violence to law,
before he can even begin to talk of charters and rights. And the moment
he does so he ceases to be conqueror and sets himself up as ruler, al-
though the habits of thought and speech may still continue to desig-
nate him by the terms of his erstwhile project.

The future-directedness of this process which converts conquest
into rulership is clearly acknowledged in classical political philosophy.
Hobbes considers it significant enough to make it the defining prin-
ciple of what he calls ‘a Common-wealth by Acquisition . . . where the
Soveraign Power is acquired by Force.’5 Dominion, he argues, can
never follow directly from conquest. All that conquest and victory in

4 Hastings’ Minutes, 12 October 1772, cited in Cambridge History of India,
vol. 5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1929), p. 597.

5 The source of this and other citations from Hobbes is Thomas Hobbes,
Leviathan , ed. C.B. Macpherson (Harmon dsworth: Penguin, 1%8), ch. 20.

376 The Small Voice of History

war do is invest the victor with the power of life and death over the
vanquished. They don’t yet establish a relationship between the two.
For that to happen, captor and captive must relate as master and
servant by a covenant which enables the latter to evade the present fury
of the Victor, by Submission’ and which secures his survival by allow-
ing futurity to prevail over the im mediacy of force. ‘And this Dominion,’
writes Hobbes, ‘is then acquired to the Victor, when the Vanquished,
to avoyd the present stroke of death, covenanteth either in expresse
words, or by sufficient signes of the Will, that so long as his life, and
the liberty of his body is allowed him, the Victor shall have the use
thereof, at his pleasure. And after such Covenant made, the Vanquished
is a SERVANT, and not before ... It is not therefore the Victory, that
giveth the right of Dominion over the Vanquished, but his own Cove-
nant.’ The importance of this argument can hardly be overstated. It
leaves the notion of a pure and unmediated entitlement acquired
by conquest nothing to stand on. ‘To demand of one Nation more
than of [any] other, from the title of Conquest, as being a Conquered
Nation, says Hobbes, pulling no punches, ‘is an act of ignorance of the
Rights of Sovereignty.’

The severity of this observation appears, however, to have done
little to prevent historians from confounding conquest with rulership.
Even when, in the rare instance, an author happens to recognize the
need for discrimination, he goes no further than to discuss the ques-
tion merely as one that concerns the victor s urge to acquire legitimacy
without asking how such an urge makes for a temporal shift transforming
conqueror into ruler. Indeed, interpreting this process in terms of a
positive legality amounts to an untoward hastening of its pace. For
the conqueror of the post-Columbian era belonged to a demimonde
where distance from metropolitan sears of power and exigencies of
adventure made invocation of the law rely less on the rigour of statutes
than on loosely constructed ceremonies and ad hoc rituals. As Patricia
Seed observes in her important work on the ceremonial aspects of the
conquest of America (the mightiest conquest of our age): At the heart
of European colonialisms were distinctive sets of expressive acts —
planting hedges, marching in ceremonial processions, measuring the
stars — using cultural signs to establish what European societies con-
sidered to be legitimate dominion over the New World. Englishmen
held that they acquired rights to the New World by physical objects,

377

A Conquest Foretold

Frenchmen by gestures, Spaniards by speech, Portuguese by numbers,
Dutch by description.’6 In other words, it requires a symbolic mediation
for the moment of conquest to be assimilated into law as a right. Inso-
far as this symbolization is the work of cultural signs’, these signs act
in each instance as carriers of agreed meanings which bring the past to
bear on a present collapsed into the future. Historicization of this kind
is nowhere more explicit than in the urge that makes an expansionist
project fall back on some tradition or other in order to justify it-
self. Most of those European powers — the English, the French,
the Portuguese, and the Spanish — which acquired dominion in the
Americas invoked the name of Rome as the source of an imperial
tradition reactivated in their respective colonial enterprises.7

In some instances, however, the emphasis would shift significantly
from tradition and past glories to the importance of conquest for the
future of the conquering powers themselves, as witness Dows claim,
made for Britain, that with the East India Company’s victory an ample
field lay open before us, but we have appropriated revolution and war
to history.’8 He connected the actuality of the clash between the
English and the Nawab thus to a prospect — an ample field’ of oppor-
tunities opening up to the victors — as well as to a past that contextualized
it in terms of all those other victories which had preceded it. Assigned
to history, the battle of Plasscy would henceforth stand out as an
eminently datable event inaugurating the 190-year-long career of
the Raj.

A Datable Victory

Datability is distinguished in this particular case by a clearly identifi-
able mark on the calendar — 23 June 1757. But it is not, in essence,
different from what makes so much of our ordinary experience datable
in everyday discourse, such as an Indian woman saying, ‘That was
when my daughter was sent back to us by her in-laws’, or a peasant,
‘Now that the river is rising . . The misery of the present out of which
the mother speaks in the first sentence straddles a past and a future.

6 Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe s Conquest of the New World
1492—1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 178.

7 Ibid., pp. 180— 4.

8 Cited in Guha, Rule of Property, p. 25.

378

The Small Voice of History

Laden with the grief of a womans life shattered already by a marriage
for dowry, it looks ahead with apprehension to the stigma (of social
failure) and the hardship (of an extra mouth to feed) with which the
poor family is condemned to live for years to come. Again, the former s
anxiety about a swelling river looks back to the labour and resources
that have gone into tilling and sowing the fields and at the same time
fears the harm it will do if the flood makes its way into the standing
crops. The now’ of the speakers implies, in these utterances, a when
corresponding respectively to the when markers of past and future.

According to Heidegger, datability denotes precisely ‘this relational
structure of the now as now- when, of the at-the-time as at-the-time-
when, and of the then as then-when.’ Even if one can no longer deter-
mine exactly and unequivocally the when of an at-the-time-when by
pointing to a calendar, events such as the discarded wife’s return to her
parental home and the threat of a river bursting its banks are no less
datable than the battle of Plassey. For they all belong equally ‘to
the essential constitution of the now, at the time and then with each
of these predicated on ‘when’ as now-when, at-the-time-when, and
then-when.9

Of course, not all of what is datable is written up as history. But that
does not take away from the truth of its temporal constitution. It only
goes to show howr little the demand of historicality is met by historio-
graphy. The inrentionalities and ideologies which guide the latter in its
selective strategies are as much a measure of this inadequacy as they are
its instruments. They make it possible and, thanks to an almost uni-
versally statist bias, necessary that the story of a marriage ruined by
dowry or of a form ruined by flood finds no place in history, but that
the battle of Plassey does. And even for that battle it is selectivity which
endows it at once with the glory of past triumphs and the promise of
more to come. The ruse of a colonialist writing seems to have manipu-
lated the datability of a relatively minor conflict to foretell the con-
quest of an entire subcontinent.

Yet it is important to notice how hesitant such manipulation has
been in a manner quite uncharacteristic of this genre. Consider, for

9 Martin Heidegger, The Bask Problems of Phenomenology , rev. ed„ trans.
Albert Hofstadtcr (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), pp. 262-3.

379

A Conquest Foretold

instance, what William Hunter, an eminent historian who was also
a high-ranking official, has to say about Plassey in The Indian Empire ,
a work which did more than most other books to influence the produc-
tion of curricular histories of the Raj for all levels of public education
since its publication in 1882:

The battle of Plassey was fought on June 23, 1757, an anniversary
afterwards remembered when the Mutiny of 1857 was at its height.
History has agreed to adopt this date as the beginning of the Empire in the
East. But the immediate results of the victory were comparatively
small, and several years passed in hard fighting before even the Bengalis
would admit the superiority of the British arms.10

What we have here is a rare instance of historiography’s doubt about
its ability to control a sequence of events it has undertaken ro narrate.
Chronology, the basic mechanism for that control, appears to have
broken down, giving conquest an anachronistic precedence in a series
where it occurs, in fact, only as the final and cumulative outcome of
years of armed conflict. Hence the embarrassment of its admission
about the somewhat unhistorical character of this dating as a mere
convention with nothing to it except a simple agreement ‘to adopt this
date as the beginning of the Empire in the East.’ Intended to uphold
the past as the only and essential concern of historical discourse,
this explanation seeks to keep the latter unmistakably apart from any
kind of foretelling.

Conquests Foretold

To recoil from foretelling was of course proper for Hunters way of
thinking and telling the past. He was simply being faithful to a tradi-
tion of historiography committed to a linear concept of time with the
past figured in it as a segment defined by its severance from the future.
The historian stands in this tradition in direct contrast to the oracle
and has as litde to do with the future as the latter with the past. In
Sophocles’ tale, Oedipus discovers this at the cost of some discomfort.
As he recalls in a dialogue with Jocasta:

1 0 W. W. Hunter, The Indian Empire: Its History People , and Products (London:
Trubner and Co., 1882), p. 285; emphasis added.

380 The Small Voice of History

One day at table, a fellow who had been drinking deeply
Made bold to say I was not my fathers son.

That hurt me; but for the time I suffered in silence
As well as J could. Next day 1 approached my parents
And asked them to tell me the truth. They were bitterly angry
That anyone should dare to put such a story about;

And I was relieved. Vet somehow the smart remained;

And a thing like that soon passes from hand to hand.

So, without my parents’ knowledge, I went to Pytho;

But came back disappointed of any answer
To the question I asked, having heard instead a tale
Of horror and misery: how 1 must marry my mother,

And become the parent of a misbegotten brood,

An offence to all mankind — and kill my father.11

The tragic outcome of that Delphian reticence is known well enough.
Its relevance for our argument lies in the fact that by refusing to play
historian to Oedipus in answer to queries about his origin, that is,
about his past, and prophesying his future instead, the oracle laid the
ground for a mans encounter with his fate and for some important
questions to be asked about the nature and function of history. It
makes one wonder, for instance, whether there is nothing to historio-
graphy other than a simple reversal of that prophetic stance and
whether the historian should therefore be concerned as little with fate
and foretelling as the priestess was with the past and its recall in that
ancient tale.

Let us consider these doubts in the light of an important class of
narratives that belongs to our time — namely, the narratives of empire.
What enables us to speak of empire and fate together in this context
is that both are distinguished by a certain traffic between past and
future in such a way as to make their trajectories intersect occasionally
in history. For fate is man’s encounter with himself in a field of possi-
bility stretched to the limit. So in a certain sense is the modern empire,
as the narrator Marlow in Conrads Heart of Darkness indicates when
he speaks of his African voyage as an obscure and yet illuminat-
ing experience in which distances and destinations were uncannily

1 1 Sophocles, King Oedipus (78 1-94), in Sophocles, The Theban Plays , trans.
E.F. Wading (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p. 47.

A Conquest Foretold 381

collapsed. ‘It was the farthest point of navigation and the culminating
point of my experience’, he says. ‘It seemed somehow to throw a kind
of light on everything about me — and into my thoughts. It was sombre
enough, too — and pitiful — not extraordinary in any way — not very
clear either. No, not very clear. And yet it seemed to throw a kind of
light.’12 The navigation he mentions is of course as geographical as it
is existential, and the light it throws on everything around him and
into his thoughts is the luminosity of self-realization in a project
where, to quote Kierkegaard, the possible corresponds exactly to
the future’ — a correspondence easily recognizable, in this context,
as fate.13

It is important to note, however, that this journey into a future of
fateful possibility does not have an absolute and abrupt ‘now’ as its
point of departure. On the contrary, it connects with some determinate
pasts, in one of which the narrator doubles back on that statement
about sailing to ‘the farthest point’ of his outward voyage to revisit his
childhood. ‘Now when I was a little chap*, he says, ‘I had a passion for
maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia,
and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were
many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked
particularly inviting on a map (but they ail look that) I would put my
finger on it and say. When 1 grow up I will go there’ ( HOD , 33).

These words, a faithful echo of Conrad’s own sentiments as an
infant visionary, document a characteristic moment of that age.14 It
was a moment of wonder which had vast areas of the earth inhabited
by Africans, Asians, Australians, and South Americans as its object.
Grasped only insufficiently yet by European knowledge, hence left

12 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness , ed. Paul O’Prey (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1984), p. 32. Hereafter HOD.

13 Soren Kierkegaard, Concept of Anxiety (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1980), p. 91.

14 See the editors introduction {HOD, 1 1 ) for Conrad s own recollection on
this point m A Personal Record: ‘It was in 1868 when nine years old or
thereabouts, that while looking at a map of Africa at the time and putting my
finger on the blank space [the Stanley Falls region] then representing the
unsolved mystery of that continent, I said to myself with absolute assurance and
an amazing audacity which are no longer in my character now: “When I grow
up I shall go diere.”’

382

The Small Voice of History

unmarked on maps, these were popularly regarded in the West as mere
voids. Insofar as the little chap — it was always a male child emulating
three generations of maJe forebears — had already learned to fill in that
void with fantasies about ‘glories of exploration , he was on his way to
having his sense of wonder transformed into curiosity.

Wonder, a primordially forward-looking disposition, which beckons
the child into the world unfolding before his gaze as a field of indefinite
possibility, translates as vismaya in Sanskrit. The radical smi underlying
that word testifies to such indefiniteness as a state of confusion where
intelligence, far from being a guide to action, is still groping for some-
thing to focus on. In circumstances of danger, says a verse in the
Hitopadesa (1 .3 1 .32), an ancient book of moral fables, vismaya leads
to a failure of decisiveness that is symptomatic of cowardice ( vipatkale
cha vismayah kapurushalakshanam) . 1 3 The heroism of exploration and
conquest requires on the contrary that curiosity should take over from
wonder, dispel indecisiveness, and bring possibility within the horizon
of well-defined projects working on particular goals. 16 The child who
could admire such projects and point at the uncharted regions on a
map to say, ‘When I grow up I will go there’, had already been educated
by curiosity The determinations of an imperial ‘there’ would pre-
pare him soon for an adulthood destined to take him, charmed like
some bird by a snake (to use Conrad s own imagery), on voyages along
a snakelike river to the very edge of the jungle where civilization
stopped. And there, at the heart of darkness, he would meet Kurtz in
the throes of his deadly encounter with fate.

Conquest Redeemed in Idea

That meeting at the very end of the story refers to the enigma of con-
quest mentioned at its beginning. Marlow spoke there of conquerors
as men of ‘brute force’, which was of course nothing to boast of* since
it was ‘just an accident arising from the weakness of others.’ Accord-
ing to him, what they did amounted simply to ‘robbery with violence,

15 Diacritical marks have been omitted for purely technical reasons from
some of the Sanskrit phrases used in this sentence.

16 For the notion of wonder, see Martin Heidegger, Basic Questions of
Philosophy , trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Andre Schuwer (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, J 994), ch. 5, esp. sections 36-8.

383

A Conquest Foretold

aggravated murder on a grand scale.’ ‘The conquest of earth, which
mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different
complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves’, he said, generalizing
the sum of all such cruelty, ‘is not a pretty thing when you look into
it too much.’ However, this was by no means the full picture. ‘What
redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental
pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea — someth-
ing you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to . . .’
{HOD, 31-2).

At issue here is apparently a distinction made between conquest
as a practice and that as an idea. Little more is said about the latter
except that it is not a sentimental pretence’ and calls for an unselfish
belief’. Presumably such unselfishness consists in regarding the idea as
‘something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice
to . . .’ In other words, the idea demands, first, elevation to a pedestal
so that the self can express its faith in a lowering gesture, and second,
a sacrifice of the self itself. The idea of conquest, as against its practice,
thus transcends the mere political and assumes a spirituality not unlike
that of some devotional cults.

It would be easy, henceforth, for the culture of conquest to invest
a purely secular and brutish dominance with an aura of providential! ty
and to invest empire with something of the allure of a sacred and mysti-
cal fate. This was precisely what had lured Kurtz into the vast and
indefinite possibility known as empire. The plans of which he went on
speaking until his dying day, and which his ‘Intended’ continued to
speak of after his death, made up a project that had reached ‘the culmi-
nating point’ of his experience. There at the very limit of civilization
and with the self exerted to its utmost, he came to confront his ultimate
adversary in fate which, according to Hegel, ‘is just the enemy, and
man stands over against it as a power fighting against it.’ 1 7 In that fight,
we know, Kurtz lost out. His last utterance, ‘The horror! The horror!’
was as far as language would take him in voicing his sense of defeat in
that unequal combat.

No individual is completely alone in this combat. For he comes face
to face with his destiny only so far as destiny is a condition of his being

17 G.W.F. Hegel, Early Theological Writings , trans. Thomas Malcolm Knox
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), p. 229.

384

The Small Voice of History

in the world. That is why its representation in its noblest form, the
tragic drama, is distinguished by the intersection of many seman-
tic fields. ‘In the language of tragic writers there is a multiplicity of
different levels’, says Vernant, and this imparts, according to him, a
singular depth to the text and makes it possible for it to be read on a
number of levels at the same time.’18

The story of Kurtz s rendezvous with fate too has been read at many
different levels. Some have regarded it as typical of that era which was
seized from time to rime by rumours about white men gone native’,
‘gone fantee’.19 Others have read in it a wide variety of contemporary
concerns ranging from blatant racism through liberal sympathy to an
almost radical anticolonialism.20 Conrad himself had situated Heart of
Darkness in that age as he defined its theme by saying, ‘The subject is
of our time distinctly.’21 That was the time of the scramble for Africa
when European explorers, traders, interlopers, and fortune hunters of
all kinds (a few of whose real-life personalities blended to make up the
composite figure of Kurtz) were often caught up in the adventures of
Western powers jostling for their place in the sun.22 The fate of indi-
viduals would get entangled on such occasions with the destiny of
empires and the temporal structure of narratives concerned with the
one approximate that of the other, blurring generic distinctions be-
tween the novelistic and the historical.

It is appropriate therefore that, with all its forward thrust, the tale
in Heart of Darkness should not be indifferent to the past. On the

18 Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy (New
York: Zone, 1988), p. 42.

19 Ian Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (London: Chatto and Windus,
1980), p. 144. Watt cites the Oxford English Dictionary to show that the phrase
gone fantee , based on the name of a Gold Coast tribe, came into English usage
in 1886 meaning ‘to join the natives and conform to their habits’.

20 For some of these leadings, see Robert D. Hamner, ed., Joseph Conrad:
ThirdWorld Perspectives (Washington, D.C.: Three Continents, 1 990), especially
Chinua Achebes ‘Image of Africa (pp. 1 1 9-29) and responses to it.

21 Cited in Watt, Conrad, p. 139.

22 A good deal of Conradiana has been devoted to the question of Kurtzs
identity. Some of the best discussion is to be found in Norman Sherry, Conrads
Western World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), and Watt,
Conrad, \

A Conquest Foretold 385

contrary, it allows the now of the actual narration to fade into ‘the
august light of abiding memories’ and ‘evoke the great spirit of the past
upon the lower reaches of the Thames’ ( HOD, 28). It is, in short,
contextualized as the most recent moment of a long tradition, so
that the story of one man’s adventure slots easily into a series made up
of other conquests,’ other empires. Says Marlow: ‘Hunters for gold or
pursuers of fame, they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the
sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land,
bearers of a spark from the sacred fire. What greatness had not floated
on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! . . . The
dreams of men, the seed of common-wealths, the germs of empires’
{HOD, 29). Dreams, seeds, germs: the indices of futurity are significantly
skewed in their distribution in these phrases, the last two of which
speak of the future of state systems and the first of individual expect-
ations. We are in an epoch when it is obviously necessary that the three
should be thought together conflating the fate of characters like Kurtz
and that of powers like Belgium and Britain, and assimilating, in
effect, the rogue to the herd, the story of the interloper, settler, or
explorer to the history of the nation. In that ethos of ambiguity with
individual projects and their corresponding anxieties and values mixed
up inextricably with corporate ones, it is left to metaphors to do all
the blending and transposing, as when ‘hunters for gold or pursuers
of fame’ who had ‘gone out’ on their own, ‘bearing the sword, and
often the torch’, are allowed almost imperceptibly to move into a very
different, should we say, national register as ‘messengers of the might
within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire.’

The maverick’s dream merges here with the much larger entities of
commonwealth and empire , with the race served so well by the vener-
able river Thames and with the nation proud of its ships and men —
the former ‘like jewels flashing in the night of time’ and the latter ‘titled
and untitled — the great knight-errants of the sea’ {HOD, 29). Lifted
by the rhetoric of this grand and aggrandizing idealization, the
sword — more often than not an instrument of senseless murder used
against the conquered — acquires the dignity of an envoy sent out by
the conquering stare, and the torch — more often than not the cause of
that smoke from burning vi llages which Marlow had noticed with hor-
ror— becomes the bearer of a spark of the sacred fire’. Transpositions
of this kind work not for fiction alone. They contribute to quick shifts

386 The Small Voice of History

of register in historical discourse as well, so that a factual statement
about the past may project the future in a manner more appropriate
to Pythian foretelling. One such shift of particular relevance to us is
that of the incendiary s torch into ‘sacred fire.’ A purely secular — and
indeed sinister — aggression turns holy in this instance thanks to a
moral twist. Not only does this enable individual adventures to be
monumentalized into national achievements; it enables history, too,
to be spiritualized as destiny.

To regard such idealization as nostalgia would be to drain it of all
significance. Its function is not to bring about a recurrence of the past
and its achievements, but to go back into the possibility of what has
been there and repeat it for future projects which are an individuals or
a generation s own. The past does not come into such repetition as time
gone dead but rather as something handed down as a living herit-
age, strong in its knowledge of the possibility of what has been. In
repetition the latter makes itself available to that other possibility — the
possibility of what is to come — for adoption in projects which criti-
cally affirm as well as disavow it for the future. The process concerned
with such a critical engagement is what historicizing is about, and it
works closely with destiny understood as the extension of the possibility
of what has been to the horizon of the possibility of what is to come.

History and fate, past and future interpenetrate thus in the nar-
rative of all that has been and will be. The tangle of temporalities which
follows from this cannot but upset historians committed to structuring
their narratives exclusively in linear time. No wonder that William
Hunter, as one of them, found it hard to explain the datability of
Plassey in terms of the conquest of India or even Bengal and shrugged
it off as an aberration justified, if at all, merely as a convenient agree-
ment to mark a beginning. What he seems to have missed is that the
event had jumped the boundary of a narrowly chronological history
and merged metonymically and providentially into the conquest to
come. In other words, he failed to acknowledge that the beginning he
wanted for the story of Britain’s South Asian empire had already been
there for it to be told at all. As a part of that story projected well into
the future, the battle of 1757 takes its place in historical discourse,
appropriately enough, as a conquest foretold. When Alexander Dow,
writing of that event as a near contemporary, boasted about appro-
priating] revolution and war to history , he, unlike Hunter, appears

A Conquest Foretold 387

to have sensed how the history he saw in the making had already
hitched its wagon to fate.

The Other Story

‘We have appropriated war and revolution to history.' A statement
such as this about the battle of Plassey could only be made by the
victors. The triumphant tone leaves no doubt that the destiny in
which history has already merged in anticipation carries the promise
of more victories to come and a local ‘revolution’ to develop into
British paramountcy in the subcontinent. It would not be long before
the exploits of conquering men and ships celebrated in the preamble
to Marlow s yarn and the values which dignified conquest into an idea
standing above the sordidness of those exploits were to ensure the
datability of 1757 in the sacred calendar of a manifest destiny as the
year when the biggest of empires was born of the smallest of battles.
And all the instruments of colonial discourse ranging from school
manuals and learned dissertations to fiction and film would be at work
to keep the story of that providential victory in circulation for the next
two hundred years.

However, there is no conquest that has only one story to it. It is made
up of at least two — one narrated by the conquerors and the other by
the conquered. Foil to the story of that steamship sailing into darkness,
there is another being told beyond the point where the civilization
of hunters, traders, explorers, and colonizers stops and the jungle
begins. We have no clue to its content. The most a narratology of the
civilized can do, using all the sophistication of its craft, is to acknowledge
it by a rhetoric of incomprehension: eyes which glow in the bush as
evidence of a numerous but unseen presence; the gathering and dis-
persal of shadows there after the logic of some mysterious movement;
voices which drone like chants, rise like cries, and die back into silence
signifying nothing; and the drums: At night sometimes the roll of
distant drums behind the curtain of trees would run up the river and
remain sustained faindy, as if hovering in the air high over our heads,
till the first break of day. Whether it meant war, peace or prayer we
could not tell {HOD, 68; my emphasis).

Not one of those sights and sounds — a burst of yells, a whirl of
black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies

388

The Small Voice of History

swaying, of eyes rolling' — not one word or gesture of that theatre
staged at every bend of the river on a set of rush walls and peaked roofs
under drooping foliage made sense. But why didn’t it? That is a ques-
tion which it is difficult to avoid in view of the claims made by the
conquerors themselves for their record of empire building. It is they
who emphasized over and over again the importance of understanding
the conquered in order to train them into a subjecthood that would
accord best with the management of modern empires. An elaborate
structure of knowledges, institutions, and policies had indeed been
devised and put in place over the centuries since Hernan Cortes
and Vasco da Gama precisely to enable colonizers to understand the
colonized and, by understanding, to control them. And all imperial
agencies were unanimous in their claim to success in this regard. The
failure on which the uncomprehending alienation of Marlow s account
turns so critically calls therefore for some explanation. And he has this
to offer: ‘We could not understand because we were too far and could
not remember, because we were travelling in the night of first ages, of
those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign — and no memories’
U HOD. 69).

Not much help here for those who have been waiting to hear the
other story. They are simply being told that the unknown is altogether
unknowable. If what was seen and heard in the bush could be said to
constitute a language, it was, according to this explanation which
explained nothing, a hieroglyph that had lost its code irretrievably. In
other words, there was a chasm separating the jungle from Central
Station, the farthest reach of civilization, and no bridge to take us
across to the other side and its yarns.

What passes as the story of conquest is therefore only half a story
pretending to be the whole. Which goes to show, among other things,
that the idea of a conquest redeemed by devotion and martyrdom —
an idealism approximating religiosity — stands only for a false, because
partial, religion. It has no claim to the latter’s universality. For conquest
is necessarily predicated on defeat, the conqueror’s faith on defiance by
the conquered, his self-sacrifice on his victims urge to defend his
life and all else he has. Consequently, for every narrative of triumph
and hope told in the conqueror s voice there is a counternarrative of
defeat and despair told by the conquered.

389

A Conquest Foretold

The latter is distinguished by a pervasive sadness. For it arises from
a deep and inescapable pain as the very condition of telling, nor unlike
those discourses that are both stimulated and sustained by trauma.
Freud demonstrates that intimate connection between pain and story
in some of his case histories. One of the lessons these have for us as
students of another kind of history concerns the dechronologization
of events in narratives produced under analysis. For it is not unusual
for a patient abruptly to deviate from the line of an ongoing recital
and get into a loop confounding end and beginning. In the case of
Katharina, for instance, her account had been developing progressively,
incident by incident, with one of the latter taken as the first of
traumatic moments from which others followed in an ordered sequence
until, on reaching a certain point, it suddenly changed its course. After
this . . . to my astonishment’, writes Freud, ‘she dropped these threads
and began to tell me two sets of older stories, which went back two
or three years earlier than the traumatic moment.*23 Much in the
same way the pain of defeat turned the order of events back on itself
in popular recollection among the conquered as the trauma of the
Mutiny of 1837 appears to have done by a direct referral to the igno-
miny of Plassey a hundred years ago.

The consequence of such temporal twists and reversals is of course
to threaten, and even nullify, the advantages of linear thinking. One
such advantage is the control exercised on events by ascribing meanings
to them. However, as Lacan has observed, ‘trauma is an extremely
ambiguous concept, since it would seem that, according to all the
clinical evidence, its fantasy-aspect is infinitely more important than
its event-aspect. Whence, the event shifts into the background in the
order of subjective references.*24 It is precisely the displacement of the
event and its signifying structures thus by ambiguity that clears the
ground for pain to posit itself in its fantasy-aspect at the classic site
of fate.

23 Joseph Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1974), p. 195.

24 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan , Book I: Freuds Papers on
Technique , 1953-1954, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: Norton, 1988),
pp. 34-5.

390

The Small Voice of History

History too is caught up in this ambiguity. Overdetermined by
destiny, the order of events on which it relies for support gives a litde
here and there, and telling tends occasionally to slip into foretelling.
And the story of conquest — that half of it which it is not for con-
querors to tell — is taken up by the conquered and told again and again
in order to overcome pain by the sheer force of reiteration. Informed
by an alternative idea of conquest, it spiritualizes subjugation by
calling upon its victims to immolate themselves in a different kind of
fire from the one lit by the subjugators to celebrate and sacralize their
triumphs. It is the fire of an equally sacred but adversary and flawed
religiosity with its own universalist pretensions. Known as nationalism,
its function has historically been to promote and perpetuate one of the
most powerful cults of our time — the cult of mourning. Little would
be left of that cult in South Asia if the conquest told long before its time
were to be taken out of it. For that would decontextualize and thereby
dissolve the pain so essential to nationalism if it were to keep itself in
play, ‘just as in chess’, says Wittgenstein, a move with the king only
takes place within a certain context, and it cannot be removed from
this context.

, p.

2S Wittgenstein, Remarks , vol. 2,

150.

The Advent of Punctuality

The rise of British power in India has long been celebrated by a
spatial metaphor. In South Asia, it is said, Britain painted the
map red, and, generally speaking, the sun never set on its global
empire. The beauty of this image lies in its simplicity. It eliminates at
one stroke the myriad starts and stops which made the imperial
adventure during its first hundred years look less like a canvas done
in monochrome than in daubs and doodles. With that mess left out
of this visionary map, the coup doeil which delights the mind is a
subcontinent with its vast plains overrun by tommies in scarlet uni-
form and their khaki -clad sepoys.

It is possible that like most metaphors, this too had its referent in
an actual experience. It could have been an experience dating back to
those earlier days of territorial expansion when the British with their
superior fire-power would enjoy an armed engagement for its sport
and drama, and relish victory as a national achievement. However,
by the time the cartographic image settled down as a conventional
figure of colonialist discourse, it had already lost the bloom of that first
intuition. To put it in Nietzschean terms, the concreteness of experience
which had helped initially to form the perceptual metaphor, had by
now volatilized in a schema, dissolving the image into a concept. 1 Just
as the concept ‘leaf’ is formed ‘by arbitrarily discarding [the] individual

1 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’, in Philosophy
and Truth: Selections from Nietzsches Notebooks of the Early 1870s , ed. and trans.
Daniel Breazeale (New Jersey & London: Humanities Press International,
1979), pp. S2-5.

392 The Small Voice of History

differences’ between real leaves and ‘by forgetting [their] distinguishing
aspects’,2 the distinctions that made a particular colonial adventure
stand apart from any other were lost in the concept which subsumed
them all — the concept of empire.

With nothing of the originary metaphor left to it except as a mere
residue,3 and imbued entirely with the notion of territoriality, empire,
as a concept, would henceforth summarize the diverse fields of colo-
nial experience into a single cartographic space painted red. Of the
many uses of this concept in which space stands for empire and vice
versa , not the least important is one that makes spatiality serve as a
dissembling device. It allows Britain’s subcontinental empire to be
thought in purely territorial terms, and the conquest as a landgrab ab-
solved from any design for social or cultural control. This is a reductive
view which fails to take into account and by failing, hides an entire
dimension of the imperial encounter — that is, the temporal dimension.

Far from originating in an act of absentmindedness, that encounter
was the outcome of a highly motivated colonial project. Everything
that followed from Clives victory at Plassey, beginning with the Com-
pany’s assumption of Diwani and culminating in its formal accession
to suzerainty by an act of Parliament, was integral to a will to domi-
nance which transformed, step by inexorable step, a mercantile corpo-
ration into paramount power. Under the given historical conditions
such a transformation required conquest to fulfil its promise by
sinking its roots deep into the land of the conquered, persuading the
latter to conform willingly to foreign rule, and assimilating the civil
society of its subjects to the military-bureaucratic apparatus of a
colonial state. No such assimilation occurred, and the Raj remained
suspended throughout its career as a dominance striving desperately
after an ever-elusive hegemony. That frustration testifies, at the same
time, to its historic failure to impose an alien temporality fully on
an indigenous population bonded by a sense of shared time and a
temporality that was all its own. The uneasy relationship of these two
temporalities, with their clash and coalescence, remains masked by the
conceptual uniformity of a thickly laid spatial metaphor. To try and

2 Ibid., p. 83.

3 Ibid., p. 85.

The Advent of Punctuality 393

dissolve that impasto would be a step towards restoring the historicality
of colonial rule in all the concreteness of its tangled times.

The beginnings of that entanglement, which increased in complexity
as the empire grew older, can be traced to the earliest phase of the East
India Company’s transactions alter Plassey. It can be traced, precisely
speaking, to the moment the Company decided to finance its trade by
the wealth of the occupied territories rather than by bullion imported
from abroad. This meant, in effect, the use, technically called ‘invest-
ment*, of the land revenues of three eastern provinces to buy vast
quantities of raw silk, cotton piecegoods, and subsequently cotton
yarn, and transport them by sea to England. The Company’s access to
such revenues, limited initially to four districts, was extended to the
entire region by 1 765 thanks to an arrangement with the weak Mughal
emperor in Delhi and a weaker Nawab of Bengal. A company of
foreign merchants stepped thus into the role of landlords, armed, un-
like other landlords, with the power to legislate about landed property,
adjudicate in all disputes concerning such property barring criminal
matters, and defend its fiscal and judicial authority by an army of its
own. However, as a state within a state, the temporal imbroglio in
which it was soon to be involved because of its access to land revenues
would have less to do with the imperial authority on whose behalf it
was supposed to be collecting the land-tax than with the tax-paying
local populations.

This is a question which the historiography of the early colonial
period doesn’t seem to have considered deeply enough. The difficulties
created by the Company’s fiscal management have been noticed and
commented upon in an extensive body of literature. But the latter,
important as it is, has been concerned primarily, indeed almost ex-
clusively, with the administrative and institutional aspect of the
question. As a result, a basic dimension of the problem, which defied
all official initiative to solve it, appears to have escaped academic re-
search and writing. What I have in mind is that curious paradox thanks
to which the mutually incompatible temporalities belonging to two
very different modes of production were yoked together in the East
India Company’s colonial venture. The jolts of that uneasy compromise
did not fail to register on the merchants as they set out, shakily, on the
road to rtdership.

394 The Small Voice of History

Like every other mercantilist project, the Company’s trade too was
driven by its urge to span the vast distances that separated its global
markets in the shortest possible time. But in India this urge was subject
to all the delays involved in converting the wealth of the land produced
under pre-capitalist conditions into merchants’ capital. For one thing,
the circulation of the latter was stymied in difficulties ofthe Company’s
own making. It is not only that the nearly chronic scarcity of silver
made all monetary transactions a source of perpetual embarrassment
for the Company. This was compounded by the want of co-ordination
between the fiscal and commercial arms of its administration. Indeed,
the rivalries between Collectors and Commercial Residents, that is,
between officials entrusted with the general administration and the
conduct of trade, respectively, was a scandal. To make things worse,
this corresponded occasionally to disagreements between the Board
of Revenue and the Board of Trade at the next higher level of the
bureaucracy. All of which tended to slow down the production and
supply of goods the Company required for its trade. Its native agents,
notorious for their prevarications and foot-dragging tactics, did little
to speed up the procurement of merchandise. Even when a consign-
ment was ready, the primitive modes of transport by bullock cart and
country boat and the poor condition of roads and waterways slowed
down its progress from hinterland to port. And beyond rhar point,
time had to yield to the tyranny of distance. For man-made obstacles
were joined by the vagaries of nature as trade winds and sailing seasons
took control of the East Indiamen and their cargoes on their way to
Liverpool and London.

With all its vicissitudes, however, the assimilation of land-tax to the
Company’s investment and other commercial transactions belonged
to the process of capitals self-realization in its mercantilist phase and
counted thus as an authentic moment of its drive to conquer space by
time. Yet that moment had its lineage in a temporality which resisted
absorption to the time of capital. Concretely, this meant the resistance
of a pre-capitalist mode of production, still very active in South Asian
agriculture, as it opposed a time of its own to the Company's time —
a traditional rhythm of work on the land to the official schedule of tax
collection, the habits of an age-old farm calendar to a fiscal calendar
imposed by a government of foreign merchants for the convenience of
their commercial operations.

395

The Advent of Punctuality

Since it was the East India Company’s policy to use the land revenue
to finance a seaborne trade, its collections had to be attuned to the
latter. Consequently, it was subjected to a discipline unprecedented in
its insistence on the regularity and punctuality of tax returns. The
mechanism used for that purpose was the qistot instalment of the total
amount officially due for collection at specified intervals.4 No inno-
vation, the qist had been a part of the fiscal procedure for at least two
centuries since the reign of Akbar. The difference between the Mughal
and the British policies was simply that with the former the number
of instalments per year ranged from four to six,5 6 with the latter from
ten to twelve. The implication of rhat difference was not limited to the
management of revenues alone. It put the state at odds with all of rural
society under early colonial rule, threatening landlords and peasants
alike and undermining the very foundations of the indigenous agrarian
system.

There was nothing in this new fiscal discipline that was not an
essential part of a strategy designed carefully to dig deep into the re-
sources of the conquered lands and extract the highest amount of tax.
This is amply documented in the debates which rocked and split the
policy-making bodies of the Company’s administration in Bengal
again and again for about thirty years between Diwani and Permanent
Settlement. Among those who favoured a moderate land tax was Philip
Francis. ‘Let us proportion our demand to our necessities, not to their
utmost abilities’, he argued invoking Montesquieu/’This was, according
to him, Mughal policy, in which a degree of ‘moderation of the tri-
bute’ combined with ‘the simplicity of their method of collecting it.’7

4 The Arabic word qist (translated as quota in Hobson-Jobson) occurs in the
official records of the colonial period mostly in its anglicized form as kist. We
have replaced the latter by ‘qist’ throughout this essay in all citations for the sake
of uniformity.

5 Noman Ahmad Siddiqi, Land Revenue Administration under the Mughals
(Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1970), pp. 58-9.

6 Cited in Ranajit Guha, A Rule of Property (Durham & London: Duke
University Press, 1996), p. 122.

7 Cited in Walter Kelly Firminger, ‘Historical Introduction to the Bengal
Portion of the Fifth Report*, in The Fifth Report of the Select Committee of the
House ofCommons on the Affairs of the Hon. East India Company, 1812 (hereafter.
Fifth Report ), vol. 1 (Calcutta: R. Cambray & Co., 1917), p. xxv.

396 The Small Voice of History

Warren Hastings opposed this view on the ground that the taxable
value of the land, as it was estimated during the reign of Akbar, had
been obsolete for some time: ‘The ancient Tumar and Tuckseem or
distribution of the land rent, which was formed about 220 years ago’,
he wrote, ‘has long ceased to serve as a rule.*8 He and his faction in the
Bengal Council believed that the Company’s territories were undertaxed
and had to yield a revenue assessed on the optimal amount of their
resources. In the next decade this view was to be upheld by the re-
searches of James Grant in his influential work, An Historical and
Comparative Analysis of the Finances of Bengal (1786).9

In the end, as we know, the optimalists won. They won not because
they were right in their view of Mughal economic history — that view
was seriously open to question — but because history was on their side.
For the arguments that divided the architects of Britain’s subcontinental
empire concerned the primary material basis on which it was to be
built. A mercantile empire, dependent for its survival on the purchase
and transport of goods from one market for sale in another, it was a
very different kind of realm from the Great Mughal’s. The latter, a pre-
modern autocracy conspicuous for the inelasticity of its demands,
however arbitrary and exorbitant these might have been on occasions,
did not need all of the agricultural surplus for tax. But a modern colo-
nial autocracy, driven by capital s urge to invest money into commodity
in order to make more money, knew no limit to its need for cash. It was
the logic of that historically insatiable need, ‘our necessities’, as Francis
called it, which triumphed over his own counsel for moderation
when his adversaries decided to exploit the full capacity of the land —
its ‘utmost abilities — in order to finance the East India Company’s
global transactions.

Insofar as speed was the very essence of those transactions and the
condition of their success, it was inevitable that the controls devised
by the Company should clash with the more relaxed conventions of the
Mughal fiscal system. The qist, as the regulator of collection time

8 Ibid., p. xxx.

9 The text of this work, described by Firminger as ‘deeply learned but
oppressively turgid’, was published as Appendix No. 4 of the Fifth Report ,
vol. 2, pp. 159-477.

The Advent of Punctuality 397

under both the regimes, emerged therefore as the ground and exemplar
of their incompatibility.

As mentioned above, Philip Francis had linked the moderation of
the land tax under the Mughals with the simplicity of their method of
collecting it/ That simplicity, which impressed by contrast with the
relatively more elaborate and complex administration introduced by
the British, was a tribute to the skill wirh which the previous regime
had co-ordinated its fiscal calendar with the traditional farm calendar
of its subjects. The decisive point at issue in such co-ordination was the
adjustment of intervals between qists to the rhythm of agricultural
production.

It was a slow, time-consuming rhythm characteristic of all pre-
capitalist modes of agriculture. With nothing to speed it up, no chemi-
cals or machinery yet to modernize the conditions of labour on the
land, its reward was, of necessity, hostage to the difference between
working period and production period. Nowhere was that difference
more obvious than in the cultivation of rice on which rural Bengal
relied for its subsistence as much as did the colonial state for its
revenues. The principal rice crop was the aman. The labour process
used for its production during the Raj was hardly different from what
it was in the pre-colonial period. Indeed, the information available to
us on this subject from Rameshwar Chakrabartis ballad Sivayan ,
composed around 1750, seven years before the conquest of Bengal,
shows a remarkable agreement with the official Survey and Settlement
reports published during the last two decades of British rule.

Taken together, all that literature, an eloquent testimony to stagnation
straddling the pre-colonial and the colonial, speaks of an agricul-
ture made up roughly (that is, not counting minor local variations) of
six basic operations, each with a working time of its own spread over
a certain number of days, making up altogether a maximum working
period of ninety days. Starting with the preparation of seedbeds
(i beejtola ) and ploughing through transplanting, weeding, and irrigat-
ing to harvesting, these operations were not continuous. Uneven in
length, they were separated by intervals of varying duration to allow
natures own time and the natural properties of the soil to interact for
a while with the inputs of human labour. These suspensions of work
on the land, calibrated to movements of the heavenly bodies and to

398

The Small Voice of History

transitions between the seasons of rain, dew, and drought, were vital
to the growth of the paddy. However, they also had the effect of
lengthening the production period well beyond the working period to
about three hundred days per year.10

The non-coincidence of working and production periods in agri-
culture is a phenomenon with which political economy has long been
familiar. ‘What is at issue here', wiote Marx, are not interruptions in
the process conditioned by the natural limits of labour-power
itself . . . What is involved is rather an interruption independent of the
length of the labour process, an interruption conditioned by the nature
of the product and its production, during which the object of labour
is subjected to natural processes of shorter or longer duration, and has
to undergo physical, chemical or physiological changes while the
labour process is either completely or partially suspended.'11

In the rice-growing regions of South Asia that difference worked
seriously to the disadvantage of the producer. Condemned to live close
to the subsistence level at the best of times, he sank still deeper into
poverty during his long wait for the crop to ripen and be ready for
harvest. Come the time of paddy blossom early in autumn, followed
soon bv the miracle of mere husk filling up to form fat grains of rice
(dhanya ailo phulya , as the balladeer wrote12), and the peasant, driven
to starvation, would walk once again into the moneylenders trap,
hypothecating the yet uncollected fruit of a whole year s toil. For all its
shortcomings, in many other respects the fiscal system of the Mughals

10 For the details of the labour process and estimates of working time and
production time in rice cultivation we have relied on Rameshwar Chakrabarti s
Siva-samkirtan ba Sivayan , edited by Jogilal Haidar (Calcutta: University of
Calcutta, 1957), pp. 233-9, 253-5, 345-8, and the. West Bengal volumes in
the Government of Bengal's vseries. Final Report on the Survey and Settlement
Operations , published just before and during the Second World War. We have
confined ourselves to West Bengal in order to make the information on the
colonial period consistent with and comparable to that gathered from the pre-
colonial text, Sivayan , which has as its narrative located in Medinipur, a district
in the same region.

11 Karl Marx, Capital vol. 2 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978),
p. 316.

12 Sivayan, p. 255.

399

The Advent of Punctuality

was sensitive to this particular predicament and had its qists adjusted
carefully to the sluggishness of the production period. By contrast, it
was the livelier and more strident pace of the Company’s trans-
continental commerce which made it insist, from the outset, on the
regularity of tax collections and the frequency and punctuality of their
instalments. The new autocacy, unlike the older, was in a hurry to get
as much out of the land as fast as possible. Consequently, the ques-
tion of qist assumed, under colonial rule, an importance it had never
known before.

In retrospect, that looks hardly surprising, given the nature of the
problem. Yet the records speak of a contemporary sense ofbewilderment
shared equally by the tax-payers and the tax-gathering authorities.
The new fiscal regime outraged the former not only as a kind of viol-
ence against well-established codes of land management, but also as a
rupture that unlinked those codes from the agrarian practices, socio-
economic stiuctures, and cultural idioms presupposed in them. The
administration, on its part, was at a loss to understand why its effort,
perfectly rational from its own point of view, should have caused so
much resentment among its native subjects. All it was trying to do was
simply to integrate tax returns to investment procedures according to
a timetable suited best to the Company’s commerce, which was the
very reason and foundation of its rulership. What could possibly be the
problem with that? It was all very confusing. When confusion com-
pounded by fiscal deficits threatened to undermine investment itself
and forced the two .sides to communicate, as it occasionally did, the en-
suing dialogues proceeded from mutually antagonistic premises and
failed to satisfy either.

The crux of the problem was simply the incompatibility of an
age-old land system of the semi-feudal type with a neo-feudal agrarian
order ushered in by colonialism. The old and the new differed not only
in their uses of time, but in the ideas and values corresponding to such
uses as well. The conflict between the two required, appropriately
enough, a temporal register. And nothing could serve that purpose
better than the aspect of governance most sensitive to time, namely, tax
collection, which, with its instalments attuned to the schedules of a
foreign power s seaborne trade, was necessarily at odds with the tradi-
tions of an indigenous farm calendar. It followed therefore that official

400

The Small Voice of History

attempts to mediate that conflict were guided not only by considerations
of time advantageous to the East India Company’s mercantile interests,
but also by the valorization of time in contemporary British and,
generally. Western bourgeois culture. Which explains the critical im-
portance of punctuality in all deliberations and decisions on the
question of qist at the highest councils of government.

How such decisions were taken at the rop and at what cost to pro-
prietors and peasants alike at the local level were highlighted by the
rigour and pain of this fiscal discipline as it was imposed in Burdwan. 13
This was one of the best administered and most prosperous districts
of eastern India under early British rule. But it was precisely because
of such prosperity that the Company had come to rely on its revenues
in order to finance investment not only from that district but from
some of the neighbouring ones as well. The authorities in Calcutta
insisted on regular and timely tax returns under all circumstances, and
even natural disasters were not reason enough for them to relent.
When, in 1 787, an important rice crop ( rabi ) of the year was ruined
by autumn floods followed by a cyclone, the Collector, the only
English official on the scene, pleaded with his superiors for some
leniency. ‘If I enforce the Payment of the Revenues by harsh Measures,
after the calamities that have taken place’, he wrote to the Board of
Revenue, ‘it may have such an Effect upon the Provinces as will nor
again be easily remediedf,] as the misfortunes which have occurred
ultimately fall on the Ryo tts . ’ The response of the Board was characterist-
ically adamant. They would not allow just ‘a temporary calamity’ to
constitute a ground for tax cuts, they said. In their view it was in-
cumbent on the zamindars rather than the government to grant relief
to their tenant-cultivators under such circumstances. Yet, that would
not justify, in their opinion, ‘any suspension of the Zemindars pay-
ments due to the government,’14

The zamindar concerned in this case was the infant Raja of Burd-
wan. Scion of a family of landowners who, true to that sobriquet, had

1 ' The primary source of information for rhis local history is Ranajir Guha
and A. Mitra (eds), Burdwan: Letters Issued 1788-1800 (Calcutta: West Bengal
Government, 1956). Hereafter, Burdwan Letters

14 Ranajit Guha, ‘Introduction1, Burdwan Letters , p. Ixx.

401

The Advent of Punctuality

ruled over their extensive properties in princely style since the Mughal
days, he faced a sea of troubles on his succession to the estate after
his father’s death. These troubles were all directly connected with the
Company s fiscal squeeze. Which was quite a remarkable development,
considering that Burdwan, unlike many of the other older zamindaris
of pre-colonial days, had survived, albeit with some difficulty, even
Reza Khans drive for optimal revenue during the first quarter of the
eighteenth century. However, judged by the amount of damage done
to the rural economy, that record of fiscal rapacity under the Nawab
was eclipsed, under the Raj, by the well-regulated tax regime ofWarren
Hastings.

An achievement of sorts no doubt, it was the measure of a regularity
imposed too well. The famine of 1 770 which, according to some esti-
mates, reduced the population of Bengal by a third, had hit Burdwan
more than most other districts. It was, according to William Hunter,
‘The first to cry out and the last to which plenty returned/ Yet the tax
for that year of disaster was the highest ever collected from the district
in a decade since 1760, and the net receipts for the ten years which
followed maintained the pressure at the same high level.15 Far from
being helped to recover from the effects of the famine, productivity in
agriculture was ruined by plunder systematized as fiscal policy. No
single interest in the land, ranging from peasant to landlord, escaped
its comprehensive grasp. Under those circumstances, with the rural
society pushed beyond its traditional limits of tolerance, someth
ing had to give. And the crunch, long overdue, came on the eve of the
Permanent Setdement — the historic neo-feudal arrangement for landed
property introduced by law in 1793.

The Raja who, like some others of his class, had managed to sur-
vive until then by various strategies of tax evasion combined with
rackrenting, finally threw up his hands. The only way for him to com-
ply with the demand for revenue, he pleaded, would be to enforce his
own demands on the lessees and other subinfeudators, and mediated
by the latter or directly on the tenant-cultivators (ryots) as well. But
there was no law, he pointed out, to allow him to do so. It was as if a

15 Foi the statistics on which these observations are based, and a more ela-
borate discussion of the problem, see ibid., p. lx.

402

The Small Voice of History

sort of double standard was at work here — ‘two methods of Judicial
process under the same Government [,] the one summary and efficient
for the satisfaction of its own claims, the other tardy and uncertain in
regard to the satisfaction of claims due to its subjccts[,] especially in a
case . . . where ability to discharge the one demand necessarily depends
on the other demand being previously realized.’16

In urging the law thus to come to the aid of property, the Raja (with
some encouragement from the Collector) was speaking not only for
himself and his class of equally hard-pressed landlords but anticipating
a significant turn in colonial policy soon to be enacted by Cornwallis.
Initially however it was not the council chamber of government in
Calcutta but its local office at a mufassil town where the Rajas plea
registered with all its urgency. For it was there that the taxpayers had
to settle accounts with the functionary most concerned with the actual
collection of revenues. The very nature of his job made the latter
particularly sensitive to the cries of distress that reached him from
stately mansions located within earshot of the bungalows as well as
from huts in the hinterland beyond the last outpost of the Raj. He had
to pay heed, if only because not a copper of the fiscal dues would reach
the treasury unless he did so.

Indifference was, in any case, out of the question, for the pressure
which caused all that distress, did not spare him either. When, for
instance, the landowners pleaded their inability to pay their taxes in
twelve monthly instalments starting with Baisakh, the first month of
the Bengali year (corresponding to April-May), and the government
demanded that they must do so regardless of consequences, it was the
Collector, Samuel Davis, who was ordered by his superiors to enforce
compliance. The official had, by then, come to know his district well
enough to realize the harm that could result from too strict an insist-
ence on the new mode of tax instalments ( qistbandi ) . 1 7 For he was sure
that the landlords would use this mode simply to pass the fiscal

16 Collectors letter to Board of Revenue, 9 January 1794, ibid., p. 93.

17 A Persian term for the schedule of revenue instalments. The British bor-
rowed it from the system of accounting that had been introduced by the
Mughals; in the English-language records of the Raj it occurs mostly in an angli-
cized form as kistbundy \

403

The Advent of Punctuality

pressure on to their tenants and start collecting rents from them right
from the beginning of the year just as the government did. This, he
feared, would be a gross violation of custom. He warned the Board of
Revenue ‘that as far as it concerns the Kists under consideration, the
thing [was] manifestly impossible without authorizing the landlords
to begin their Mofiissil collections in the month of Bysack, which
would be a violation of their engagements with the Ryotts in this part
of the country and I believe all over Bengal.*18

The violation at issue was temporal. To force the Raja and the other
landlords to bring forward their annual collection in conformity to the
official timetable would be to oppose it to the traditional form calendar
of the region, and, along with it, to all that it implied for agriculture
and the practices and belief systems associated with it. The bureaucrats
in Calcutta were not amused and made no secret of their displeasure
that a mere subordinate should talk back at them. Asked to justify his
views on this question, Collector Davis did so in a manner that left
nothing to doubt about the nature of the anomaly created by govern-
ment policy.19

The schedule of twelve monthly instalments, he observed, would
require the zamindars to pay their dues in progressively larger qists
during the first quarter of the year. Stated in sicca rupees, this
amounted to 183,995 for Baisakh (April-May), !84,190forjyaishtha
(May-June), and 261,879 for Ashar (June-July). That was a great
deal of money which the landlords could pay only if they had a lot of
cash lying around, or if they could borrow it from the moneylenders.
However, as things stood at the time after decades of the most severe
fiscal pressure, they were, as a class, wanting both in cash and credit.
The only realistic option left open to them would therefore be to pay
what they owed to government by collecting it as rent from their
own tenant-cultivators. But that, wrote the Collector to the Board of
Revenue, would be a violation of engagement*.

He then proceeded to explain why. In a richly informed passage
which spoke at the same time of his concern, he invoked the authority
and experience of the oldest local inhabitants. According to them, it

18 Collector to Board of Revenue, 27 August 1793, ibid., p. 71.

19 Collector to Board of Revenue, 17 September 1793, ibid., pp. 74-5.

404

The Small Voice of History

had never been the custom in this part of the country ‘to interrupt the
Ryotts in their progress of cultivation during the two first, and but
seldom during [the] three first months of the year, by urging demands
which few of them would be able to satisfy.1 For, that was precisely the
time of the year when ‘instead of being in a condition to pay money
[were] , for much the greater part, employed in soliciting loans from
merchants.1 They would do so on the credit of crops’, using, in effect,
for security ‘the prospect of successful cultivation in Assar [Ashar or
June-July] and Sawun [Shraban or July-August].1 If the gamble paid
off and all went well, they would be able ‘to make their first payment
in Bhaudun [Bhadra or August-September].1 That would amount
usually to a due proportion1 of the three qists owing to the zamindar
for those months he had desisted from pressing his claim on the ryot.
It was ‘this custom of forbearance until Bhadun1 — as the Collector
called it — which shielded the peasant from the fiscal squeeze during
a critical part of the production period. To Davis this custom seemed
eminently ‘founded on reason, and to have the force of a written
engagement.’ He had therefore no doubt that ‘any attempt to depart
from this custom would be immediately complained of by the Ryotts.1

Sketched clearly in this local cameo, there is an outline of a tradi-
tional sense of time attuned to the seasons and cycles of agricultural
production, to the labour process and the production period corres-
ponding to it, and to the landlord s demand for rents and the states
entitlement to taxes. The precarious balance between all these factors
which constituted the rhythm of rural India’s economic and social life
was seldom upset under the precolonial conditions. The regimes in
power, with all their failings in other respects, were astute enough to
realize how vital that rhythm was to tradition and the damage it could
do if it were disrupted. But the East India Company had little use
for circumspection. It simply knocked out the temporal basis of that
tradition and replaced it by a blunt and rigid fiscal routine based on
what seemed to be an altogether alien sense of time to the natives. Far
from being friendly to the ‘custom of forbearance1 the government
attacked and destroyed that custom, replacing it by a law designed
clearly to empower the landlords at the expense of the peasantry.
Enacted as Regulation XXXV of 1795, it was conspicuous for its em-
phasis on punctuality and regularity as its governing principle.

405

The Advent of Punctuality

The concern for regularity was never absent from the official
agenda, for the success of the Company s mercantile operations de-
pended on it. Conforming to the latter, the regime encoded that
concern into a revised schedule (qistbandi) of twelve monthly payments.
Since this ran foul of the traditional agreement between landlord and
peasant nearly everywhere in Bengal, Samuel Davis was not the only
district officer to report local resistance and seek guidance from the
authorities in Calcutta. Worries about the qist, followed invariably by
insistence on regularity and punctuality, featured therefore in almost
all the proceedings of the Board of Revenue and often in those of the
Governor General in Council as well. Yet when the basic land law for
the region was enacted in 1793 in the form of the Permanent
Settlement, this vital aspect of tax management was not fully integrated
in the right of perpetuity granted to the zamindars. There were legal
loopholes that made it difficult for them to pass the fiscal pressure on
to their under farmers and tenants. It was precisely this difficulty which
had inspired all those complaints of the Burdwan Collector about ‘two
methods of Judicial process under the same Government/ Regulation
XXXV was the latcers response to that complaint. Described officially
as ‘A Regulation for enabling individuals to recover arrears of rent or
revenue due to them’, its object, made clear in those opening words
of the statute, was to align land management to fiscal management.
For, ‘Government not admitting of any delay in the public revenue
receivable from proprietors and farmers of land, justice requires that
they should have the means of levying their rents and revenues with
equal punctuality .’20 In effect, this amounted to arming the landlords
with legal powers of distraint over their tenants in order to cut delay
in the collection of rents. It matched no doubt the right of distraint
exercised by the government itself against tax defaulters, and was
supposed, as such, to be a gesture of even-handed justice. Obviously,
justice, under the rule of property inaugurated by the Raj, would
henceforth be limited to its transactions with the propertied classes
alone and not extend to the ryots.

The alignment of property and fiscality corresponded thus to an
alignment of legality and temporality. This emerges clearly from the

20 Fifth Report , vol. 2, p. 566. Emphasis added.

406

The Small Voice of History

care taken to write the temporal conditions of distraint into the Statute-
Worked out in meticulous detail, it specifies the time of every single
operation. The section on ‘Rules regarding the Sale of distrained
Property* begins thus:

After the expiration of the fifth day, and before the elapse of the eighth
day, calculating from the day following the day on which the attachment
of the property of a defaulter shall have taken place, or if the property
attached shall consist of crops, or other ungathered products of the
earth, after the elapse of the fifth day, and before the expiration of the
eighth day, commencing from the day following the day on which such
crops or products may have been stored as directed in Section XIII, of
Regulation XVII, 1793, the distrainer shall apply to the cauzy of the
pergunnah to have the same appraised and sold.21

And so it goes on: ‘about the Day of the Sale as ‘the day on which it
is to be sold, which shall be the fifteenth day, commencing from the
day following the day on which the attachment may take place’; about
‘the Hour of the Day when the Sale is to be made’ as ‘the time of the
day when the greatest number of people may be supposed to assemble
with the property ‘brought to the place of sale on the morning of the
sale’, etc., etc. That, of course, is nor all. The same concern for minutiae
is evident in all the other rules as well, with the number of days given
for ‘the Payment of the Purchase money for distrained Property’, for
the collection of dues from a defaulter threatened with distraint, for
the calculation of interest on arrear, and so forth.22

That detail testifies no doubt to the fact that punctuality had won
out. It had indeed done so to the extent that the government had
something to boast about its collection of revenues from Bengal for
November-December 1794 (corresponding to Pous in the Ben-
gali calendar). It was not only the highest amount received for the
same month in four years. More importantly, it had come in time and
augured well for the rest of the fiscal year, since ‘the payments made on
account of [Pous] are always considered as a good criterion for forming

21 Ibid., p. 567.

22 Ibid. pp. 567-70.

The Advent of Punctuality 407

a judgment of the punctuality with which the remaining kists are likely
to be realized.’23

Punctuality of that kind, enforced so far by executive measures,
would henceforth have all the force of the law to work for it. Yet, even
in its hour of triumph, it was still not the epitome of morality, an
absolute and sovereign virtue, into which it would be glorified —
almost transmogrified, one could say — by a combination of Christian
ethics and colonialist education during the mid- Victorian phase of the
Raj. For the moment, during the last decade of the eighteenth century,
it was still the name of a contingent tactic of governance essential to
trade and conquest.

For, however proud Punctuality, stern daughter of Mammon, may
be of the instant of time held tight in her fist, what she has in her grasp
is only the point, punct , the least of space dissolved into the least of
time, that is, into a now-point, or simply ‘now’. That now, which
passes off as quintessential time, has a distinctively spatial pedigree.
As a now-point it is always a now-here, now-there, and so on. For a
stranger to insist on punctuality could, therefore, be regarded as an
assertion of his presence here and now. Nothing to endear him to the
native. To the latter, the temporal threat, like the one that disrupted the
indigenous farm calendar by an alien mercantile-fiscal timetable, had
an unmistakably spatial correlative to it. Armed with punctuality, it
signalled the intruders’ determination to cling to the ‘here’ predicated
on the now’ and stay on. And nowhere was that spatial connection
elucidated more clearly than in the drama of seizure and auction en-
acted in thousands of villages with the bailiff s hammer coming down
on the defaulter s properties with clockwork regularity. All over eastern
India desolate hamlets, ancient homesteads vacated by families who
had failed the deadline for payment of arrears, peasant huts whose
owners had melted into the night before the morning of the dreaded
auction, were, for the colonized, a spatial record of the fact that dis-
traint with its unwavering schedule of days and hours had cut a swathe
across that part of the country.

23 Ibid., p. 561. For a statement of receipts on the Pous Towjee, 1 784-94,
see ibid., pp. 564-5.

408

The Small Voice of History

That massive campaign, which redistributed land among a new
class of rentiers by dispossessing the old in the course of thirty years
following Permanent Settlement, marked the ultimate triumph of
punctuality as an engine of expropriation. By then it was clear beyond
all doubt that the new temporality had already secured a base for its
dominance in territoriality. From now on conquest would no longer
be seen as rider speeding, sword in hand, across the plains towards a
receding horizon. A new iconography, more appropriate to the times,
would take over. Its canons would require a rather stationary, indeed
sedentary figure, surrounded by orderlies and office files and sporting,
on the waistcoat, the chain of a pocket-watch.

A Colonial City and its Time(s)

Our story of the temporal displacements caused by colonial-
ism had to begin in the countryside not only because the
conquest which started it all had been fought in a mango
grove, but also because rural society was the first to be seriously affected
by the East India Company’s mercantile time and its fiscal timetable.
Yet, the signs of the resulting discrepancies were perhaps far less
obvious to villagers than to those living closer to the urban and semi-
urban seats of British power in the subcontinent. Here, that power was
represented directly by the white employees of the regime and their
families, as well as by the administrative and social institutions of
the Raj. Consequently the time of civil society found itself flanked
by a stranger, that is, the time of the so-called civil lines at every sadar
station and mufassil town. In many respects, life in the bungalow and
the cantonment kept itself scrupulously apart from that of the native
setrlement, both as a matter of official policy and cultural choice, a
segregation documented well in Anglo-Indian literature. Inevitably,
however, the schedule of parallel lives had to buckle under the im-
peratives of an alien regimes dependence on local services, skills, and
even goodwill for its survival. So, from the bustle of chota hazri syn-
chronizing the attendance of cooks and servants at the elaborate ritual
of English breakfast through the sound of hours beaten on bell-metal
gongs announcing the beginning and end of the administrative
day, to the cries of night-watch on its rounds, the new sarkari time
would overlap native time as a matter of course in any small town.

Copyright © 2008 Ranajit Guha. First published in The Indian Economic
and Social History Review, vol. 45, no. 3, 2008, pp. 329-5 1 .

410

The Small Voice of History

However, it was in the principal cities that the design and drama of
such intersection were most pronounced, for the authority of the sahib
radiating from these urban centres rested squarely on the back of a
bureaucracy made up of Indians at its lowest levels. The very structure
of governance made it necessary, therefore, that official time should
impinge on the time of civil society. What makes such impingement
interesting and exciting to study (however confusing it might have
been to live) is that it did not, indeed could not, replicate the general
configuration of power in anything so neat as a nexus of dominance
and subordination. On the contrary, it amounted to a tangle of two
braided temporalities, requiring each to resist as well as accommo-
date the other.

The patterns of that braiding had been an object of curiosity to both
British and Indian observers since the early colonial days. However,
their views slanted at somewhat different angles. What the former saw
in this phenomenon was a native sense of time characterized by delays,
inexactitudes, unpunctualities, and other vagaries which were a cons-
tant source of irritation to them. The sahibs and memsahibs wrote
on this subject obsessively in myriad jokes, insults, innuendoes, or
plain comment, regarded often as ethnological or political wisdom by
other sahibs and memsahibs. Whatever the form, it all added up to a
comprehensive attribution of unreliability to an Indian attitude,
behaviour, and personality made up of abstractions and prototypes.
What were the Indians supposed to be unreliable for? For those services
required of them as khansamans , bawarchis , ayahs, darzis , dhobis, peons,
saises, malis, orderlies, babus, and so on every day in and around the
bungalows, kachehris, cantonments, clubs, and other institutions that
affirmed the presence and power of their rulers in a colonial city. From
the rulers’ point of view, all that inconvenience and confusion were due
entirely to the peculiarities of an indigenous time prone to slowing
down, interrupting, and otherwise hindering the smooth and effective
flow of a master time governed by rules which the colonized, as a popu-
lation of servants, could never understand or grasp.

An Early Literary Response to Changing Times

The temporal scene looked confusing in the eyes of the natives as well,
but with a difference. No one amongst them blamed the sahibs for

411

A Colonial City and its Ttme(s)

the peculiarities of their sense of time. The problems it created for
the indigenous society were all regarded by the latter as its own prob-
lem— a problem of failure on the part of the Indians themselves to
adjust to the alien temporality introduced by the Company Raj. There
was a comic side to this maladjustment, and the natives used it to
make fun of themselves in satire, farce, and parody. There was a serious
side to it as well, and the vernacular literatures of the nineteenth
century inscribed its anxieties copiously for a growing indigenous
urban middle-class readership.

An early instance of that literary response, Bhabanicharan Bandyo-
padhyay s Kalikata Kamalalay, dates back to 1 823. 1 Written in Bangla,
it is a dialogue between a villager on his first visit to Calcutta and a local
resident. The title of the work testifies to the reputation the city
had already acquired by then as the abode of Kamala, the goddess of
wealth. Paradoxically, the wealth so blessed by her presence belonged
to the foreign merchants and financiers for whom the East India
Company’s capital in the subcontinent served, in this period, as an
important base of their global transactions. Not surprisingly, there-
fore, there were many amongst the indigenous eli te who felt threatened
by such unprecedented and rapid economic development, and the
word had gone out — helped to an extent by a vernacular press — that
all was not well with the Hindu way of life — or achara — in Calcutta.
The visitor interrogates his host closely on some matters of urgent
concern. Is it true, he asks, that the residents of this city go out to work
after an early meal and don’t come back home until fairly late at night,
and that too simply to eat and sleep in before leaving for work first
thing next morning?2 Isn’t it a fact that most of them have no use any
more for the traditional Hindu codes of conduct, including those
concerning morning and evening worship, and that even things like
the funerary ceremonies {shraddha) required to end the state of ritual
pollution caused by a death in the family have all been abandoned?
How is it, he wonders, echoing rumours circulating in the outback,
that they all dress like foreigners in Calcutta, eat meals prepared for
them by Muslim cooks, drink brandy on ritual occasions, ignore

1 The text used in this article is Bandyopadhyay, Kalikata Kamalalay (here-
after KK).

2 KKt p. 8.

412

The Small Voice of History

shastric literature published in Bangla, and read nothing other than
what is available in English and Persian?3

The resident townsman tries to allay these fears as best he can.
Villagers have been misinformed about life in the city, he suggests. Yes,
there are some Hindus who have been affected by those new ways, he
admits, but by and large the older tradition is still intact amongst the
higher castes. In reassuring his interlocutor thus, he was no doubt
voicing the opinion of the conservative elements amongst the city elite,
of whom the author was himself a leading representative. But the
fact that such reassurance was at all called for is important. It speaks
of changing times, indeed of changes indexed in popular perception,
with the advent of a new temporality rivalling one that was habitual
and sanctified by custom.

The prose in which that perception was registered was itself
contemporary to the new rhythm of time. Fostered by the East India
Company's administration for the training of its officers at the Fort
William College, and nurtured at schools set up to educate a native
middle class as clerks and collaborators, Bangla prose, though older
than British rule, owed its modernization primarily to the colonial city.
As such, it was not only witness to those alien objects and institu-
tions that had made their way into the language as loan words, listed
at length in Kalikata Kamalalay , but was sensitive to contemporary
anxieties as well. The dialogue in that text serves both as a measure
of such anxieties and the means to deal with them. It confronts the
city -dweller with the villagei as his alter ego, and his self-doubts as
questions asked by a country bumpkin. A relatively new discursive
form, one that wouid enable mirror images and divided selves to be
inscribed more and more frequently in literary works, this prose is true
to the changing times.

However, with all its complicity, that discourse still has an air of
aloofness about it. Less than eager to own up to its provenance in the
world and times which are its object, it acknowledges change, but is
not itself integral to it. It is a judgemental, reticent prose still not fully
involved in the life of a colonial city at its formative phase. With that
phase decisively over by the middle of the century, Calcutta was to
celebrate its coming of age in writing adequate to the surge of its urban

3 Ibid., pp. 10-11.

413

A Colonial City and its Time(s)

ethos. Far from holding back, it would spill over into the streets, join
the crowds, and defy the over-Sanskritized sensibilities of the literati
by adopting the mode of everyday speech as its vehicle.

Hutom Pyanchar Naksha

The text which announced that outrageously brilliant debut was
Hutom Pyanchar Naksha .4 Published in 1861, it was immediately
hailed as the signal of a radical turn in Bangla literature, and age has
done nothing to dim that reputation. Unfortunately, however, the racy
colloquialism on which the work relies for its diction is precisely what
has made it inaccessible so far to those not familiar with the language
of the original. It resists translation. Attempts to render it into English
did not proceed beyond a few extracts, which is a shame, considering
that the author was obviously interested in getting himself heard on
both sides of the linguistic divide.5 In Calcutta, as in the rest of Bri tains
subcontinental empire, English served the regime both as an instrument
of dominance and an agency of persuasion. As the language of the
rulers, it stood for all that set them conspicuously apart from the mass
of their subjects, who spoke only in the local tongues. Yet, at the same
time, as the principal medium of an officially sponsored education
(which had, by then, come to mean English-style education, accord-
ing to Bankimchandra Chatterjee), it was the means used by the Raj
to induce a very small, but affluent and socially powerful, minority
amongst the colonized to favour collaboration.6

Kaliprasanna Sinha, author of Hutom (the book was published
under a pseudonym, but that, like rhe text itself, was part of a char-
acteristic playfulness that made it all the easier for the author to be

4 References are all to Sinha, Satik Hutom (hereafter, Hutom). This is by far
the best edition of the work available, and is based on the 1 868 recension of the
original, which was the third and final version to have been published during
the authors lifetime.

5 Arun Nag, editor of Hutom, refers to two of these partial translations, one
in the Hindoo Patriot of 1862, presumably by Krishnadas Pal, and another,
published anonymously in 1864 and attributed to Lai Behari De. Hutom ,
pp. 287-8. [The first English translation, by Swarup Roy, of the full text has
now been published as The Observant Owl, Delhi: Black Kite, 2008. — Ed.]

6 For an elaborate discussion of education as an instrument of persuasion, see
my Dominance without Hegemony.

414

The Small Voice of History

identified by his contemporaries), was one of that elite, the crime de
la crime \ Scion of a leading and wealthy family of the city, he was
educated at the Hindu College. Its standing as the premier Western-
style school in India at the time relied to no small extent on the repu-
tation of its teachers of English literature. It is perhaps to them that
Kaliprasanna, like some of the illustrious alumni before him, owed his
knowledge of Shakespeare and Beaumont and Fletcher cited in his
epigraphs. But more than anything else, it is a work by Charles Dickens
to which his book has been linked ever since its publication.7 The
Dickensian connection cannot be confirmed by any direct referen-
ces or citations. However, ihere is some evidence to show that the
young Calcutta author must have been acquainted with the work of his
older London contemporary. He alludes to Dickens obliquely, yet
transparently enough, to acknowledge his debt, just as the inclusion of
an occasional clip from Hitchcock in one of his own films has been,
in our own time, the youngTruffaut s way of honouring the master and
relating to him.

Hutom and Boz

This intertextuality, which straddles two very different linguistic codes
and literary traditions, not to speak of the unequal power relations
corresponding to them, is displayed clearly on the title page of the
second edition of the book, published within a year of the first. The
title is given in both Bangla and English.8 The former translates as
‘Sketches by Hutom the Owf, or perhaps as ‘Sketches by the Hooting
Owl*. But compare it with the English. Printed in capitals, it reads,
‘SKETCHES BY HOOTUM ILLUSTRATIVE OF EVERY DAY
LIFE AND EVERY DAY PEOPLE’. How does one account for the

7 Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay was one of his contemporaries to suggest
the change. In a review article, ‘Bengali Literature’ , published in the Calcutta
Review (nos 1 04, 1 06) of 1 87 1 , a year after Kaliprasanna Sinhas death, Bankim
described Hutom Pyanchar Naksha as a collection of sketches of city-life,
something after the manner of Dickens s Sketches by Boz , in which the follies and
peculiarities of all classes, and not seldom of men actually living, are described
in a racy, vigorous language, not seldom disfigured by obscenity.' Bankim
Rachanabalu vol. 3, p. 112.

8 Hutom, pp. 284-5

415

A Colonial City and its Time(s)

omission of the owl and the addition of nine other words here? For
an answer, one has only to insert a hyphen between ‘EVERY* and
‘DAY*, and replace ‘HOOTUM* by ‘BOZ’ to realize how the title
was rewritten in English in a self-conscious attempt to echo that of
Dickens’s work, published twenty-five years earlier.9

The junior (only 25 when he published Hutom) had obviously
found his master. The land which he, an Anglicist (labelled so by
Bankimchandra), had been educated to look up to as the very source
of enlightenment provided him with a model to emulate with a project
of his own. But what was it that made him undertake that project in
the first place? His interests ranged on a wide front, from publish-
ing to philanthropy and social reform. He was taken up with myriad
public activities. Even as a writer, he moved easily between genres as
a dramatist, journalist, and translator.10 With so many other things to
do and such a many-sided talent to invest in them, did he have to write
about his city at all? To ask this is already to wonder if the choice was
entirely his own, or made for him by the spirit of an age that had
thematized the city for the literatures of the West, and given Paris its
Balzac, London its Dickens. By comparison, Calcutta was of course
just incipiently urban. But that did not take away from its importance
as an issue of that historic movement which required every modern
empire to sire a colonial city. Caught upinthatweb of complementarity,
the latter and its restless muse, both children of their time, had to have
a Hutom to match the metropolitan Boz.

Realism and Historicity in Boz

Our interest in this obscure lineage has nothing to do with any design
to make amends for the oversights of literary history. We simply wish

9 The first edition of Dickens’s Sketches by *Boz, Illustrative of Every-day Life
and Every-day People was published in 1 836. Our references to this work,
hereafter Bozt are to the 1 839 edition, published in Penguin Classics as Sketches
by Boz

10 ‘In a short life of 30 years, Kaliprasanna founded and edited journals,
patronised the new Bengali stage, translated the Mahabhamta into Bangla in
collaboration with Sanskrit pundits, and became a major philanthropist who
was particularly active in famine relief and widow remarriage.* Hutom> p. 7.

416

The Small Voice of History

to point out how, in the colonial era, the discourse of power intersected
with the discourse of the city. This was not of course central to J. Hillis
Millers concern in his influential essay, which helped, some thirty
years ago, to focus academic attention on Sketches by Boz more than
ever before.1 1 Yet his argument is not without relevance to us. He sets
out to examine the standing of this work as an epitome of realism.
Contemporaries, he says, were impressed by its ‘inimitably faithful
observation and inimitably faithful reproduction of the details of
London life, especially as it was lived by its middle and lower classes.
The accolade has continued for over a century until our day, with
critics competing with each other to highlight what they consider its
startling fidelity to real life, its near ‘documentary’ character, its
recording of ‘facts observed with an astonishing precision and wealth
of detail’.12

Responding to this Cratylean chorus which backs up, in effect,
Dickens’s own represen tationalist claim that ‘his object has been to
present little pictures of life and manners as they really are’,13 Miller
focuses on one particular arrangement of those ‘little pictures’. Life
and manners are depicted here by a massive accumulation of things,
which is no doubt appropriate for an age distinguished by the pro-
duction, exchange, and the general proliferation of commodities as its
hallmark. If, therefore, things clutter up this text, they do so in much
the same way that they overload the space in a genre of sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century European painting.14 But this parallelism serves,
sadly, as the measure of a certain pathos of distance as well. It parodies,
in a Nietzschean manner, an earlier and complacent phase of modernity
by one more recent and bitter; the self-assurance of the mercantile era
by the anxieties of the industrial, the images of abundance decorating
the larders and tables of Amsterdam’s burghers by those of destitution

11 Miller, ‘The Fiction of Realism’, pp. 85-153.

12 Citations are from Miller, ‘The Fiction of Realism’, pp. 89-91, and Boz,
pp. xii-xiii.

13 Boz, p. 7.

14 The Well-stocked Kitchen ( 1 566) by Joachim Beuckelaerat the Rijkmuseum,
Amsterdam, and Woman Looktngata Table by Wolfing Heimbach (c. 1610-

1678) at the Staatliche Gemaldegalerie, Kassel, are fairly representative of
this genre.

A Colonial City and its Time(s) 4 1 7

in the slums of the London poor — the pawnshop, the brokers shop,
the junk shop, as described by Dickens.

The objects that crowd this description are precisely those on which
Sketches by Boz relies for its so-called objectivity. Household goods for
the most part, they exude a sense of the familiar. Their plenitude stands
for the density of the real. Even the randomness of their deployment
is taken as an authentic index to the disorder of London life. Indeed,
as Raymond Williams has remarked, that city could not easily be des-
cribed in a rhetorical gesture of repressive uniformity*. Quite to the
contrary, its miscellanea, variety, and randomness were, according to
him, ‘the most apparent things about it, especially when seen from the
inside*. Underlying all that, however, was a deep structure embodying
a system — a negative system of indifference; a positive system of dif-
ferentiation, in law, power and financial control.’ It was this coexistence
of surface agitation and systemic depth, randomness and regular-
ity, ‘the visible individual facts’ and ‘beyond them, often hidden, the
common condition and destiny, which made London something of
‘a contradiction, a paradox’. Dickens dealt with that paradox by
creating ‘a new kind of novel’, adequate to ‘this double condition: the
random and the systematic, the visible and the obscured, which’, says
Williams, ‘is the true significance of the city, and especially at this
period of the capital city, as a dominant social form.’15

A sense of that ‘double condition* informs Miller’s approach to the
Sketches as well. This is not surprising in view of the fact that the lattei
is regarded, in some ways, as ‘a characteristic expression of Dickens’s
genius’, an ‘embryo’ which anticipates, even in the journalistic mode,
much of what was soon to emerge as distinctive about his novels.16
But the duplexity highlighted in this reading works at the textual rather
than the social level. The interplay between the obvious and the
hidden, the contingent and the necessary is, in this instance, referred
to as that between the unruly miscellaneousness of things and the
control imposed by the narrative. This transcendental move, so essen-
tial to any description whatsoever, enables the critic to ask how
such a confused jumble’ could yield so neatly ordered a series of tales.

15 Williams, The Country and the City , pp. 1 90-1 .

ih Miller is quite explicit on this point, as he writes: ‘In spite of . . . later
works of Dickens’: Miller, ‘The Fiction of Realism’, p. 93.

418

The Small Voice of History

How do the multitude and diversity of things which, in his view, stand
for the apparent disorder of London as a whole’, not prevent the author
from fashioning well-crafted stories out of them? What is the logic of
this production? The answer lies, for Miller, in what he calls the ‘law
of metonymic correspondence’, 17 based, he says after Roman Jakobson,
on ‘the assumption of a necessary similarity between a man, his
environment, and the life he is forced to lead within that environment.’ 1 8
Guided by that law, the author first posits a ‘scene with its inanimate
objects, then the people of whose lives these objects are the signs, and
finally the constitutive narrative of their lives, which may be inferred
from the traces of themselves they have left behind.’19

Order of Things and Order of Time

What interests us most about this graduation is the manner in which
it allows the order of things to take over from the order of time. There
is a good deal in the Sketches that show this narrative strategy at work,
as in the well-known article, ‘Meditations in Monmouth-Street’.20 On
one of his walks through that street, ‘the only true and real emporium
for second-hand wearing apparel’, Boz falls into a reverie before a
collection of used footwear, ‘fitting visionary feet and legs . . . into
boots and shoes’, until, moving from things to people, he matches a
sturdy pair of boots to a delicate pair of satin shoes, and goes on to
translate that as a tale of friendship between a Covent Garden coach-
man and a servant girl — a tale with just a hint of a happy ending, of
course. There are other cameos of this kind, but none that illustrates
the process of metonymic substitution as well as the story inspired
by ‘a few suits of clothes ranged outside a shop-window’ farther up
the street.21

Those clothes, says the author, ‘must at different periods have all
belonged to, and been worn by, the same individual.’22 With nothing

17 Ibid., p. 100.

18 Ibid., p. 98.

19 Jbid., p. 96.

20 Boz, pp. 96-104.

21 Ibid., p. 98.

22 Ibid.

419

A Colonial City and its Time(s)

else to support that assertion, he proceeds to assign the suits — five in
all — to the presumed owner, beginning with the smallest for infancy
through the next two sizes corresponding successively to adolescence
and early youth, until with suit no. 4, ‘[a] long period had elapsed,
and . . . [tjhe vices ofthe boy had grown with the man. *23The last item,
made up of articles of clothing of the commonest description’, sug-
gests a sad and violent closure to the series, with the poor protagonist,
now a criminal, sentenced to banishment or the gallows. The end of
the tale was not at all clear, but it was easy, according to Boz, ‘to guess
its termination in a lingering death, possibly of many years duration,
thousands of miles away.’24

Easy to guess, because it was predictable. As Miller observes, ‘the
row of old clothes. . . in Monmouth Street gives rise. . . to a wholly
conventional narrative, the story ofthe idle apprentice’, rehashed over
and over again in eighteenth-century English fiction and drama.25
This, he says, clinching the argument on realism, ‘is not the metonymic
process authenticating realistic representation [,] but a movement
deeper and deeper into the conventional, the concocted, the schematic.’

For us, however, the matter is not quite settled yet. It begs a further
question about that movement itself, which allows a description of
things as they are to slip into the schematic, the quotidian into the
conventional. How does an arrangement of clothes translate into the
stages of an individuals life? What is it that brings about the substitution
of spatial contiguity by the temporal? The order of time has obviously
taken over from the order of things in this narrative, with a little help
from the author himself. He has used some familiar tricks ofthe trade,
such as falling into a reverie in medias res , to switch from the present
to the past, and let his account of everyday life and everyday people
drift into history. Indeed, he leaves his reader in no doubt about his
historicizing intention, as Boz begins his story of the hapless apprentice
by saying, ‘There was the man s whole life written as legibly as on those
clothes, as if we had his autobiography engrossed on parchment be-
fore us.’26 And, true to the tradition of assimilating biography and

23 Ibid., pp. 100-1.

24 Ibid., p. 101.

25 Millet, ‘The Fiction of Realism', p. 119.

20 Boz, p.99.

420

The Small Voice of History

autobiography generically to historical discourse, he refers to the
last of the five suits as what completed the history’.27

The Everyday Dissolved in History

It is a condition of this move deeper and deeper into history that it
must dissolve the here and now of everydayness. Yet, the latter is what
the book is about, as the title page shows. Is there a contradiction
here? Or is it enough to say, as Miller does following Roland Barthes,
that the ‘reality effect’ of the story based on ‘referential illusion has
simply worn out in the process of the telling? For, even if that were true
(and there is no reason to doubt it), it still leaves us with the paradox
of the everyday fluctuating, in its concept, between a specified day in
the calendar as it follows another and a dateless, nameless average
which stands for all days, but is identical to none. It rains every day
during the monsoon in Calcutta, but the everyday misery of the city’s
street-dwellers is not confined to any particular day of the wet and dry
seasons. The phrase everyday’ stands today, in this instance, for a
contemporaneity, a sense of shared time spread over three generations
since the Famine and Partition, bonding myriad refugees into a com-
munity which has only the pavement for its home. It is this contemp-
oraneity that constitutes their being- with-one-another in a shared
world. It enables every lived instant, every ‘now’, to escape the disci-
pline of linear succession occasionally to hark back and look ahead.
Therefore, the temporality of everydayness allows the present to host
the past and its forward-looking historicities.

The objects contemplated by Boz, too, were witness to a world
defined by the co-temporality of everydayness. Useful things, they had
served a community of users. Insofar as the latter shared their time with
others as the very condition of their worldhood, the household and
other goods of everyday use were themselves elements of that temporal-
ity. Afloat in the tide of time, these were ‘the ballast of familiar life, the
present and the past’.28 Commuting between the two, Bozs narrat-
ive picked its way through the junk of flea markets, slotting things
dispersed by the force of circumstance back into their contexts in

27 Ibid., p. 101.

28 Wordsworth, Prelude , p. 286.

421

A Colonial City and its Time(s)

time. It was thus that an emergent mode of literary discourse, some-
thing between the journalistic and the novelistic, restored many a
humble life to its historicality ignored by historiography. By sounding
the lower depths of London society, it added depth to the ongoing
historicization of the great metropolitan city in English literature.

Raymond Williams traces the historicizing tendency back to
Wordsworth who, he says, had already inaugurated ‘a permanent way
of seeing any historical city*.29 That was, of course, very much a grand
vision, ‘A sight so touching in its majesty’, like the panorama of ‘Ships,
towers, domes, theatres, and temples’ viewed from Westminster
Bridge early one morning in 1 802.30The sense of distance persists even
when the poet finds himself in a crowd and regards ‘The face of every
one that passes me as a mystery.31 Dickens, on the other hand, speaks
of London with an easy familiarity. The ‘speculative pedestrian, child
of his imagination, could point to a man in the street and say, ‘We
knew all about him’.32 Between The Prelude and Sketches by Boz , a
w hole generation had grown up. An observer, given to what he himself
called ‘amateur vagrancy’, could now refer to a slummy quarter of the
capital as ‘the only true and real emporium for second-hand wearing
apparel’.33 If this echoed the tribute paid by the older muse to ‘the vast
metropolis’ as ‘[t]hat great emporium’ and ‘lf]ount of my country’s
destiny and the world s’, 34 it was no mocking allusion. It only showed
that the great city was perhaps a shade less numinous than it had been
in the Age of Commerce, and that it had adjusted itself to the every-
dayness of a modern industrial and administrative capital. It had been
historicized. Literature in the imperial West could no longer deal with
the city without history breathing over its shoulder.

The Present in the Naksha

By contrast, the historicist imperative is conspicuous by its absence in
Hutom Pyanchar Naksha. That is not to suggest that it is ahistorical in

29 Williams, The Country and the City , p. 188.

30 Works of Wordsworth, p. 269.

31 Wordsworth, Prelude , p. 286.

52 Bos, p. 102.

33 Ibid., p. 96.

34 Ibid., p. 339.

422 The Small Voice of History

some sense. Far from it, the Naksha affirms its historicality by deploy-
ing time in a manner strikingly different from the Sketches . The latter,
we have seen, traces its way back from the day-to-day to connect itself
by a direct linear nexus to the past. The actual, assimilated thus to the
bygone, adds to its density, and the shards of broken lives, picked up
from the backstreets of London, are fitted ingeniously into the tale of
England’s expansion overseas. Nothing could be more different from
the temporal strategy of the Naksha , based on a total involvement
with the present, which, instead of being overtaken by the past as in the
Sketches , does the overtaking itself. The past is by no means left out,
but no sooner does it make its appearance than it is absorbed into
the ongoing surge of the present. The aspect of light, the present or
vartamdna, contrasted in Indian thought and language with the more
obscure aspects of the past and the future, affirms its authority by
letting some of the characteristic phenomena of urban life disclose
themselves as they make their way through the narrative, for ‘The
present is a path that is like 1 ight itself * ( vartamano adhva prakdsavat) ,35
One of these phenomena, designated as hujuk or sensations, is a
miscellany made up of a couple of dozen items.36 These range from
rumours and panics through anecdotes about upstarts, tricksters, and
impostors, to even something like political news in a few instances.
What they have in common, cutting across diversities, is their role as
gossip in Hutom s Calcutta. Exploited for its content, it has been grist
so far either to the mill of social history (as evidence), or to that of a
fcuilleton literature of scandals (as kechha). Between the earnestness of
the one and the triviality of the other, what remains unacknowledged
is the immediacy of presence disclosed in such gossip. As a phenomenon,
it lives only for the day, literally as an ephemeros or adyatana , in a
state of utter transience. Consequently, it is the ‘now’, the vehicle of its
circulation, rather than the messages circulated, that enables this

See Bhartrhari, Vakyapadiya , Kalasamuddesa, 53: dvau tu tatra tamo-
rupdvekasya lokavat $thitih\ and Helarajas commentary on that verse in Vdkyapa-
diya of Bhartrhari, p. 60.

36 Twenty-three items, to be precise, taking togecher the contents of the three
rubrics called ‘Hujuk’, ‘Bujruki’ and ‘Babu Padmalochan Dana orofey Hathat
Avatar1. Hutom , pp. 123-213.

A Colonial City and its Time(s) 423

discourse to weld the mass of its interlocutors together into an urban
public. The instantaneous exchange of information in myriad bits,
with no particular demand to make on reflection, generates a concern
which, for all its indefiniteness and volatility — or, precisely because of
these — constitutes the very ground of that publicness. It is not what
people are talking about that is vital to such gossip, but the fact that
they are talking to one another in a state of average intelligibility. It is
this that creates a sense of shared time out of the sum of short-lived
sensations, and helps, together with other factors, to form the worldhood
of a colonial public.

Gossip feeds on curiosity and is driven by it. Whether it is about a
seven-legged cow, or the prospect of dead souls returning to earth in
the year of the Mutiny, or the lifestyle of the local parvenus, or an
occasional fracas involving natives and whites, gossip, in this text, is
the public voice of curiosity. Curiosity, like gossip, belongs to the
present, but with a distinct inclination towards the future. Ever on
the lookout for the new and for what is to come, its absorption in the
present is, in every instance, an awaiting for a possibility in which to
consummate itself. However, the awaiting does not last long enough,
since there is always another object to chase. The moment of consum-
mation never comes.37 Cursed thus by incompleteness, curiosity is
constantly on the move. That, of course, is not conducive to the sedi-
mentation history requires for its seedbed. Nothing germinates in this
incessantly unsettled contemporaneity. Fragments of the past show up
in it from time to time as tradition, genealogy, or plain nostalgia, but
are burnt up at once. In contrast to the serene and monumental
historicity of the metropolitan capital to which Wordsworth paid his

37 See Heidegger, Being and Time (p. 397): ‘The craving for the new is of
course a way of proceeding towards something not yet seen, but in such a man-
ner that the making present seeks to extricate itself from awaiting. Curiosity is
futural in a way which is altogether inauthentic, and in such a manner, more-
over, that it does not await a possibility , but, in its craving, just desires such a
possibility as something actual. Curiosity gets constituted by a making present
which is not held on to, but which, in merely making present, thereby seeks
constantly to run away from the awaiting in which it is nevertheless “held”,
though not held on to.’

424

The Small Voice of History

tribute, the capital city of the Raj, driven by gossip and consumed by
curiosity, is rocked, according to Hutom, by a perpetual restlessness.

This restlessness, with the present always on the move along a
path going nowhere, has a temporal register made out for it in many
languages. Panini offers us an insight into this point in the well-known
sutra, vartamdne lat (3.2.123), with the vrtti defining the present as
what has commenced, but not been completed {arabdho \ asamdptascha
vartamdnah). For Bangla, the same progressive aspect, ghataman
bartaman , has been defined by Sunitikumar Chattopadhyay in identi-
cal terms.38 In this language, the unfinished state of the present shows
up clearly in verb phrases ending with - techhi , - techho , - techhish , and
- techhe , or colloquially, with the - te elided, as in the Naksha . The pre-
sent progressive, reiterated thrice in three consecutive clauses, inaugu-
rates this text, setting it to the mood of the narrative to follow. This
is an attunement which, like the opening phrase of a raga, is also
an invitation, for it is the start of a festival. Hutom announces it in his
very first words: ‘The sound of drums is being heard from every
quarter of the city of Calcutta.’ A lot is going on in what, according
to his description, is the site of a continuous bustle. Unlike Boz, who
constructed his scenes and tales out of lists stacked with the names of
things, our narrator relies on arrays of verb phrases to produce inter-
weaving sounds and telescoped sights, noises, and crowds always in a
state of agitation, testifying to the urban festival as a scene of endlessly
recursive activity, all starts and no stops.

It is hard to fit this image of the city into the everydayness the author
claims to have illustrated in the Naksha. The work is dominated, in
volume and in spirit, by a turbulence incompatible with the routine
and the regular that had come to characterize everyday life in Hutom s
time. Following the logic of a conquest normalized into rulership, the
everyday of this capital of the Raj stood for a firm, if alien, order. The
principal organs of government — the army, the bureaucracy, and the
judiciary — all had their headquarters there. Many of the big finan-
cial institutions and mercantile houses, too, operated with Calcutta as
their base. These, like the state apparatus to which they were closely
linked, relied critically on the local population to keep the regime and

38 Sunitikumar Chattopadhyay, Bhasha-Prakash, pp. 321-2.

425

A Colonial City and its Time{s)

its accessories serviced, and the wheels of power turning in every de-
partment, from law and order through banking and trade to education.
Six days a week, this vast collaboration was visible in the movement of
these native employees commuting in large numbers between the
residential parts of the city and its administrative and commercial
quarters, known popularly as the ophis-para. Now , para is an old and
intimate word which means, in Bangla, a close-knit neighbourhood of
families who had long known one another, sometimes for generations,
and were bonded in some instances by kinship, craft, or trade.39
For such a word to be compounded with a signifier borrowed from
English, and associated directly with the powerhouses of imperial
authority, must be a measure of the extent to which the indigenous
speech-community had come to accept the site of its daily pen-
pushing as a second community. Language testifies to such habituation
by other usages as well. A kind of horse-drawn vehicle hired by the
babus for transport to ophis-para had their status written into its
name. It was called keranchi-gari , that is, carriage for keranis , after the
occupation of its passengers, clerks or kerani — a generic term subsum-
ing a wide variety of salaried personnel employed by governmental
and commercial agencies."*0

Corresponding to such designations for the place of everyday
work and everyday transport was also a phrase for office time, that is,
ophisher bela. In this coupling, again of Bangla and English, there are
two connotations of particular interest to us. One of these concerns the
urgency that bela could convey sometimes to suggest that the kerani
could be late for work, and must hurry up. The other, more basic
though not entirely unrelated, idea is that of bela as a portion of the
everyday allocated to the office, and the use made of it as a part of
ones job. Ophisher bela, or office time, amounts thus to a deduction

39 Some of the older street names of Calcutta testify to this connotation: for
example, Bosepara Lane (after the Bose, a Kayastha caste group), Kansaripara
Lane (after the Kansari, a caste group of traditional craftsmen and traders in bell
metal), and so on.

40 For keranchi-gari , not to be confused with the office-jam used by white
employees, see Mitra, Kalikata-darpan , p. 174. The following are some of the
various kinds of keranis mentioned in the Naksha: ship-sarkar , booking clerk,
clerk; keraniy head writer and writer.

426

The Small Voice of History

in favour of official time imposed by the regime at the expense of the
lived time of the indigenous civil society. The latter is not and cannot
be fully assimilated to the colonial state, a dominance without hege-
mony. Consequently, it is forced to subsist on the remainder left to
it after the appropriation of a considerable part of its time by the
bureaucracy each day — each ‘ten-to-five day (as the keranis call it
themselves) — of the working week. The everyday is thus hollowed out,
creating an empriness for all those not directly involved in the day-
return trip to ophis-para. The first to be trapped in this vacuum is,
of course, the woman of the house. When she tries to overcome the
weight of the lonely segment of the day, the private foil to office time,
and transform it creatively into a hiatus made her own by reading or
some other occupation of her choosing at home or in the world be-
yond, that initiative is opposed by all the powers of patriarchy.

Thus, the everyday was irreparably split in the middle, with one
part assimilated to official time and alienated from the civil society.
How, then, could everyday life and everyday people be inscribed in the
discourse of the colonial city? What made the author claim, implausibly
as it seems, that the Naksha was ‘illustrative of everyday life and every-
day people when it was nothing of the kind, and had indeed the very
different phenomenon of festivals for its theme? It is not that he did
not know what he was doing. On the contrary, the echoing allusion
to Sketches by Boz in the title of his own work was, as we have seen,
altogether deliberate. If so, was it just an instance of mimicry, with an
Indian writer gilding his work with a title borrowed from the imperial
metropolis? Or was it a case of parody, using imitation to affirm
difference? For a master of parody, which Kaliprasanna Sinha was, the
latter would indeed be quite in character.

Parodia Sacra

The Naksha is rich in parody. It is in fact an outstanding example of
this genre in Bangla, as recognized by readers, critics, and historians
alike. A wide range of rhetorical modes, from irony and wit to satire
aiid plain farce, has been deployed here with a virtuosity stunning in
its parodic effect. The material used to pioduce that effect is just an
unassorted medley of anecdotes, events, and characters. Yet, if the

A Colonial City and its Time(s) 427

text has not dissipated in diversity or sunk under its weight, it is be-
cause of the concept that holds it together. This is the concept of the
festival as a shong. The latter is Bangla for a masked representation, in
which the display has what is hidden for its referent. Many of the
images on show at the stalls set up for the occasion or taken out in
floats doing the rounds, para after para, throughout the city, have this
double meaning. By highlighting the not-too- veiled gap between what
is concealed and what is not, they amuse and instruct the spectators.
However, the spectators are in masks themselves. No one in rhe crowd
is what he appears to be. Everybody has dressed up for the shong. So
has Hutom, as he confides to the reader. He, too, is out to enjoy him-
self, like anyone else looking up the exhibits and commenting on them.
However, unlike the others, it is not only the images made of straw and
clay that he comments on, but the lively crowd milling around in
masks as well. For the entire city, with all that is human in it, has been
transformed into a masquerade by the festival. It is easy, of course, to
regard this representation of the shong as a critique of the discrepancy
between appearance and reality, which is characteristic of urban life
itself. That is how the Naksha has been read so far, almost exclusively
in these terms — a reading that relies for the most part on the authors
reformist views to justify itself.

However, such a reading is perhaps unduly restrictive. Driven by its
concern with nineteenth-century literature as only a documentation
of social reform, it fails to take into account the full measure of the
parodic intention of the book as announced on its title page. The
parody begins there. It is a part of the shong itself that a work on
the festival should come out masked as an illustration of the everyday.
Equally, if not more, of a double entendre is the curious fact that the
mask is not even homemade. It is a bilati (foreign or British) mask,
modelled on a master narrative and put on deliberately to mock it. To
parody something so specific to the language, literature, and culture
of the colonial masters, so mighty and elevated, is to move daringly
close to that perverse genre, the parodia sacra, in which the Ave Maria
and the Pater Noster could easily turn into liturgies of drunks and
gamblers, liturgies about money’, and evangelical readings into 'highly
indiscreet stories’. Such profanation, says Mikhail Bakhtin, to whom
we owe our understanding of that medieval European phenomenon.

428

The Small Voice of History

was typically bilingual. The Latin of the sacred text served as its vehicle
in the main, but turned into a macaronic hybrid when projected
against the vulgar national language and penetrated by its accentuating
system. According to Bakhtin, this hybridity testifies to the essentially
dialogical character of parody, in which ‘two languages are crossed
with each other, as well as two styles, two linguistic points of view, and
in the final analysis two speaking subjects.’41

Parody does not rely for its effect on hybridization in the Naksha
(as it did, for instance, more or less in the same period, in the burlesque
of Rupchand Pakshi). Its Bangla, youthful and audacious in the full
swing of its glow, makes no concession to the English. It takes on the
latter from time to time but only to engage it playfully in punning.
The vernacular is fully in charge here. Yet the text, for all its linguistic
autonomy, commits itself to a dialogue the moment it adopts the title
of the Sketches by putting them in invisible quotation marks on its own
title page. That quotation, a tactic used in all manner of travesties, is
meant to draw attention to a typically metropolitan way of looking
at the city. That way, a ‘ new way, an authentic way of seeing not just
a city but the capital city’, is traced by Raymond Williams to the
seventh book of The Prelude.42 But London, the capital city of that
great poem, had grown in size and population since then. The urban
theme, celebrated by the poet, has a new dimension added to it now
by Dickens’s prose. Squalor claims a place for itself in literary descrip-
tion dominated so far, if not quite monopolized, by grandeur. Yet,
for Williams, ‘the noise of the working day' does not take away from
the importance of the older vision as ‘a permanent way of seeing any
historical city. . . Paris. . . Naples, Vienna, Berlin, Rome, St. Peters-
burg, Budapest, Moscow. . . [t]he cities of civilisation, in this capital
sense. . .’43 A peculiarity of English society and culture in the Age of
Empire has thus been generalized beyond its national territorial
boundaries, and elevated to the status of a universal truth. What con-
cerns us about , this universalist conceit is, first, that a ‘new’ and
‘authentic’ way of seeing the British capital during the first half of the

41 Bakhtin. Dialogic Imagination , pp. 74-7.

42 Williams, The Country and the City , pp. 184, 185. Emphasis added.

43 Ibid., p. 188.

A Colonial City and its Time(s) 429

nineteenth century should so easily turn into a permanent way of
seeing any historical city’, and second, that only European cities
should qualify as objects of this selective gaze.

Calcutta’s Everyday and Its Festivals

Calcutta was, of course, excluded from this list by definition. Yet it
was the capital of the Raj, the jewel in the crown. It could thus be said
to have earned a place for itself in history, and become a ‘historical
city* according to some version of what Williams called ‘this capital
sense’. As such, it too merited a look. This was the point of Hutom’s
parody. Parody, as we know, is ‘a dialogue between points of view’.44
Accordingly, the dialogue engaged in the Naksha was clearly be-
tween two ways of seeing a capital city in the Age of Empire. Boz,
for his part, saw it in terms of everyday life and everyday people. But
imperial Londons everyday was not and could not be the same as
colonial Calcutta’s, which, as noticed above, was already annexed for
the most part to an externally imposed official time. What was still left
to the subject population to live outside the working day, which was
taken up with servicing an alien state machine, was only a truncated
and diminished everyday. It was restored to its fulness only when
official time, embodied in the kerani s six-day week, was suspended,
that is, when there was a festival in the city.

‘Festivals’, wrote Henri Lefebvre, ‘contrasted violently with everyday
life, but they were not separate from it. They were like everyday life,
but more intense.’45 That intensity, which is temporal in essence,
makes itself felt first as a plenitude. All the dispersed moments of the
day-to-day occupied with individual pursuits, each in its own discrete
time, are gathered in a festival to make up the fulness of a community’s
time. This may be celebrated, as it often is, with excess and abandon.
It is as if the celebrants have all the time in the world — an indulgence
that compensates for the strict temporal economy of the everyday in
all societies. However, the sense of compensation was all the more
heightened in a colonial city like Calcutta, if only because it was

44 Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination , p. 76.

45 Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life , p. 207.

430

The Small Voice of History

proportionate to the impoverishment of an everyday life occupied
with the administrative routines of an alien power. Here, the drudgery
of office work contrasted sharply with the exuberance of the festivals —
the Charok, the Durga Puja, and the Ramlila as described by Hutom.
By the same token, his parody highlights the contrast between London
and Calcutta to show how, on the festive occasions, the purloined
everyday returns to the subject people to constitute a time of their own,
a plenitude resistant to colonization and fragmentation.

Festivity and Community

The everyday, intensified into festival, is thus a communitarian experi-
ence for the colonized. That is to say, the festival welds the latter into
a community of celebrants, since ‘A festival exists only in being cele-
brated’, as Hans-Georg Gadamer has observed.46 To celebrate is to be
present at what is celebrated together with others. A kind of bonding,
a festival’ to quote Gadamer again, ‘unites everyone. It is characteristic
of festive celebration that it is meaningful only for those actually taking
part. As such, it represents a unique kind of presence. . .’47 It is, in other
words, a sharing presence, and its time a participatory ‘now’ in terms
of which the participants define themselves. Considered thus, the
festival of the colonial city is a moment of self-assertion on the part of
the colonized in an elevated and intensified presence inaccessible to
official time. Hutom s parody was a gesture of that self-assertion in all
its desperate pride.

It is a measure of such desperation and pride that the Naksha
was published at a time uncomfortably close to the Mutiny. It was
1861. The rebellion had been put down, but the Raj was still busy
picking up the pieces to repair its battered authority. Punitive measures
had blown up into a comprehensive revanchism. It was working its
way through the disturbed regions, systematically confiscating rebel
property and redistributing it among collaborators. Throughout the
land, fugitives from the sepoy army were still being hunted down,
hanged at dreaded courts martial, or simply being shot on sight. The

4il Gadamer, Truth and Method \ p. 11 0

47 Gadamer, Relevance of the BeautijuU p.49. The idea is elaborated further
in pp. 39-42, 58-61.

431

A Colonial City and its Time(s)

air was heavy with the smell of gunpowder. This, the native knew, was
no time for confrontation. Defeated and disarmed, he had recourse to
language as the last, but inalienable, armoury of the weak, and parody
as one of the most effective weapons still available to him. Its use, in
the Naksha , is meant to give assertiveness the neutral air of sim-
ple observation. Yet, even that does not read quite as the innocuous
dialogue it pretends to be. He is keen to press the point against his
imaginary interlocutor that unlike in the metropolis, life and people
‘as they are in the colonial city can never be adequately represented
by descriptions of the everyday as an integral time. With the everyday
reduced to official time under the alien regime, its subjects have
nothing other than their festivals, in which alone they are represented
in the fulness and authenticity of a shared communal time. In other
words, contrary to what the literati of metropolitan Britain believed,
their way of seeing their capital and other European cities in the Age
of Empire was not, and could not be, the same as the way the colonized
in South Asia saw their own cities. For them, official time and indi-
genous time were two distinct entities, and called for rather different
interpretations — official and indigenous — with little in common.

Two Ways of Seeing Calcutta

Thus, the thrust of Hutom s parody goes significantly beyond upholding
the indigenous festival against the metropolitan everyday. Underlying
that alternative point of view is a more radical assertiveness, keen on
distinguishing between the indigenous and official ways of seeing
Calcutta. With the strengthening of British paramountcy in the
subcontinent, that city too gained in importance, decade by decade,
throughout the nineteenth century. As the capital of the Raj, it was
the most obvious exemplar of its power and opulence. Its value as a
showpiece was therefore not lost on the rulers. Already in 1833, Lord
William Bentinck, one of the more far-sighted of India’s governors-
general, urged his administration to encourage members of ruling and
influential families to visit the city and spend some time there.

A twelve months’ sojourn of such persons at our seat of government,
viewing our arts and arms, the arrangement and magnificence of our
buildings, the order and suitableness of our business establishments,

432

The Small Voice of History

our institutions for education, the ingenuity displayed in such machin-
ery as has reached the east, and the ships carrying on our commerce,
would do more to diffuse just notions of our power and resources,
of the importance of our alliance than any measures we can pursue.
By such means we should have a chance of becoming truly known
throughout this great empire as the powerful people we in fact are.

Seeing all these things too with their own eyes, it would be reason-
able to expect that visitors would return to their homes improved both
in knowledge and feelings, and therefore better qualified to discharge
those duties for which providence has destined them.48

The official view of the city could not be more clearly and compre-
hensibly stated. As Bentinck saw it — and wanted the native elite to see
it ‘with their own eyes and for their own edification — Calcutta was
the very epitome of Britain’s power in the East. Everything it had
to show — its arts, arms, and education, its business, transport, and
technology — was governmental, and stamped ‘ours’. The second per-
son plural stands here for the Raj as rulers and proprietors — as the
powerful people we in fact are’ — dominating this representation
completely and exclusively. There is no room in it for any of them , that
is, any indigenous will or interest or activity that is not slotted into the
grand imperial design.

The reduction of the colonial city to an entity which can be claimed
as ours’ from the standpoint of colonialism is exclusive because it
is contained in official time and cannot see beyond it. A kind of theo-
rizing, it is defined negatively by what it cannot see. What it is blind
to is the city of the festival. The latter requires, for its representa-
tion, another theory, another way of seeing the world, which Hutom
brings to it. He is able to do so because he belongs to that world in the
plenitude of its own time, that is, festival time. His competence to re-
present it derives also from the primordial and inalienable privilege of
a native speaker. For time and language work together in that world as
the very condition of its narrative possibility.

However, in the Age of Empire, that possibility is always and
necessarily precarious, as the world with which the indigenous discourse

48 Bentincks minute of 5 August 1833. Correspondence, p. 861. Emphasis
added.

A Colonial City and its Time(s) 433

is concerned can no longer remain hermetically sealed. Even the
festival, with the native speaker as its poet and participant, must learn
to live with alien intrusions. Colonialism would not allow it to forget
its presence. Hutoms narrative, set in the present progressive, is
interrupted at regular intervals by the gun fired thrice everyday at the
Fort William, the supreme headquarters of the British army in the
subcontinent. It is the gun which reminds the subjects, morning,
noon, and evening, that official time rules, never mind the native
festivals. The Naksha transcribes that warning phonetically every
now and then in the course of an ongoing yarn, ‘There goes the gun
ghrm \ there goes the gun ghpsh \ or, ‘ghpsh korey top porey gelo\ ghrm
korey top porey gelo\ as in the original. The contrast between the melli-
fluous vowels of Bangla and the harsh consonants packed into the
voice of the hour-gun could not be emphasized more. It left the
colonized in no doubt as to who was in command even at that moment
of total absorption in festival time — a time they had always considered
their own.

References

Bakhtin, Mikhail, M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination. Trans. Caryl Emerson
and Michael Holquist. Austin.

Bandyopadhyay, Bhabanicharan. 1936-7 [Bengali Year 1343]. Kalikata
Kamalalay , ed. Brajendranath Bandyopadhyay. Calcutta.

Bentinck, William. 1977. The Correspondence of Lord William Cavendish
Bentincky ed. C.H. Philips. Vol. II. Oxford.

Bhartrhari. 1 973. Vakyapadiya of Bhartrhari with the Prakirnakaprakdsa of
Helardjay ed. K.A. Subramania Iyer. Kanda III, Part II. Poona.
Chattopadhyay, Bankimchandra. 1969. Bankim Rachanahalu ed. Jogesh
Chandra Bagai. Vol. 3. Calcutta.

Chattopadhyay, Sunitikumar. 1945. Bhasha-Prakash Bangala Vyakaran. Calcutta.
Dickens, Charles. 1995. Sketches by Bozy ed. Dennis Walden. Harmondsworth.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1 986. The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays.
Trans. Nicholas Walker, ed. Robert Bernasconi. Cambridge.

. Truth and Method. 1988. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G.

Marshall. New York.

Guha, Ranajit. 1 998. Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in
Colonial India . Cambridge, Mass.

Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Trans. John MacQuarrie and
Edward Robinson. Oxford.

434 The Small Voice of History

Lefebvre, Henri. 1992. Critique of Everyday Life. Trans. John Moore. London.
Miller, J. Hillis. 1971. ‘The Fiction of Realism: Sketches by Boz, Oliver Twist ,
and Cruikshanks Illustrations . In Dickens Centennial Essays , ed. Ada
Nisbet and Blake Nevius, pp. 85-153. Berkeley.

Mitra, Radharaman. 1980. Kalikata-darpan, Calcutta.

Sinha, Kaliprasanna. Bengali Year 1398 [1991-2]. Satik Hutom Pyanchar
Naksha , cd. Arun Nag. Calcutta.

~ • 2008. The Observant Owl: Hooturns Vignettes of Nineteenth-century

Calcutta. Trans. Swarup Roy. New Delhi.

Williams, Raymond. 1975. The Country and the City. Frogmore.
Wordsworth, William. 1971 . The Prelude, ed. Ernest de Selincourt. London.
. The Works of William Wordsworth. 1994. Hertfordshire.

Sir William Jones

i 1 I 1 he Father of Indology emerges from this study as a pretty poor
I mouse. Dr Mukherjee takes a close look at Joness record as a

JL linguist, historian, and translator from Indian languages. 1 His
‘discoveries' about the affinity of Indo-European languages had al-
ready been largely anticipated by other European scholars. His chro-
nology of Indian history made confusion worse confounded, if only
because of his uncritical adherence to the current practice of fitting
oriental traditions to Judaeo-Christian creation myths. The identifi-
cation of Sandrocottas as Chandragupta had already been arrived at
by Joseph de Guignes years before Jones came up with it. As an epi-
giaphist, Jones’s achievement falls far below that of Wilkins, Prinsep,
and Radhakanta Sharman. Wilkins was a better Sanskritist, too, and
Jones’s own translations are the result of his collaboration with Indian
scholars. And, finally, the Digest of Hindu and Mohammedan Law
which he wanted to bequeath as a noble legacy from me to three and
twenty million black British subjects’ turned out to be a disorderly
compilation’, according to James Mill, and a work of Very little prac-
tical value" according to Dr Mukherjee.

Yet this was the man who, almost before he had learnt the element-
ary rules of Sanskrit grammar, came out with a weighty pronounce-
ment on the structure of that language; who, equipped with the ragbag

1 S.N. Mukherjee, Sir William Jones: A Study in Eighteenth-Century British
Attitudes to India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968).

436

The Small Voice of History

of biblical legend as the basis of his historiography, casually set about
writing a comprehensive history of the ancient world; and who, even
before he reached Calcutta, had made up a sixteen-point plan of in-
vestigation ranging from proofs and illustrations of scripture to ‘the
Music of the Eastern Nations.

The curious fact is that Jones himself seems never to have been
bothered by doubts about his intellectual ambition being far out of
proportion to his ability. If this was something that had to do with his
personality, the present monograph at least is no guide to our under-
standing on that particular point. Dr Mukherjee talks of Jones’s ‘com-
plex personality’ without telling us exactly what he means. Far from
being complex, Jones comes out in these pages as being very ordinary
indeed. He seems to have had an excessive attachment to his mother,
but we have no way of knowing what it actually means in terms of
behaviour except that from time to time he would quote the old lady
in justification of any of his attitudes, and that he used to dote on his
wife. Dr Mukherjee speaks of his aversion to power. Yet such aversion,
if there was any, did not prevent Jones from seeking patronage in the
manner characteristic of his times. He was as conformist as any of his
brand of Radical Whigs, and it is not quite clear why Dr Mukherjee,
against his own evidence, describes Jones as having been to some extent
alienated from Oxford: at every crunch Jones seems to have jumped up
in defence of the Oxford system of education and scholarship.

What emerges is in fact the portrait of a man of large ambitions and
little talent — and less humour. This latter characteristic was noted by
Horace Walpole, that shrewd contemporary, who found Jones’s elec-
tion address ‘absurd and pedantic’, and subsequently by Bentham, for
whom Jones was an industrious man with no sort of genius’. One is
not surprised that as a young man Jones used to prefer swimming to
dancing; that as an aspiring scholar he found Voltaire’s wit unbearable,
apparently because ‘he cannot give an abstract of the Newtonian
philosophy without interspersing it with strokes of humour’; and that,
in translating Kalidasas famous play, he omitted all that in the original
referred to the heroine’s bosom.

Dr Mukherjee is quite right in concluding that Jones’s legacy boils
down to one solid achievement — the foundation of the Asiatic Society.
Yet the legend dies hard that he was the founder of Indology. The

437

Sir William Jones

legend continues to hurt and to falsify to the extent that even in this,
the most recent work on the subject, there is no mention at all of Max
Muller (except in the bibliography) and that even in a work of this kind
the tradition of pedantry has left its stain: why indulge in the archaic
distinction between romanticism and classicism when it is so obvi-
ously futile to try and draw a line? Why, for that matter, use diacritical
marks for Sanskrit words, particularly if one has not quite mastered the
rules which govern them?

Europe and the Exotic

The speakers at this conference have, in these four days, taken
us to many lands, shown us many things.1 All that has been
said about these places, all the stories told and all the images
displayed, add up in my mind as a loosely organized narrative with a
somewhat picaresque flavour about it.

Its hero, the scholar-adventurer, has been driven by doubt, he
has yielded to temptation; he has suffered. But at the end, he, like his
prototype in Apulieus’ great work of that genre, has gained wisdom
and redeemed himself through experience. He has done so of course
without having to change his shape. But in all other respects, the an-
cient Roman and the modern European protagonist of our story have
been alike. They have both been to places and seen things. Spatiality
and visuality have been the cardinal factors of experience for both.

Spatiality. Think of the number of countries to which we have been
transported during these eight sessions — France, England, Ireland,
Germany, Russia, China, Japan, Indonesia, India. A lot of ground to
cover in such a short time. But that precisely has been the point of
this exercise.

Temporality, in this genre, is conspicuous by its lack of histori-
cism. The hero, as an adventurer, does not need time as a defining
element of his career. Ail he needs is topos to indicate his movement

1 Comments at a conference held at the Humanities Research Centre,
Australian National University, Canberra, July 1987.

439

Europe and the Exotic

from one site of adventure to another. Change is represented here in
a series of ground-marks that differentiate the subject from his Other.
That Other may be a race, nationality, language, country, artefact,
or whatever. But in all instances, the Other is situated outside the
subjects own space. Exo , Greek for outside’, has therefore been in-
corporated as a symbolic recognition of this otherness in the exotic.

It makes sense that spatiality should develop a special relationship
with visuality in the discourse of the exotic. For, if the alien is indeed
a particular determination of space, what can apprehend the alien
more readily than the subjects gaze? This connection is indeed so
powerful that an exotic sound may evoke an exotic visual image for
a European musician, as it obviously does for Roy Howat when he
sees — yes, sees — the curl of a Burmese pagoda in a passage of Debussy s
music.

As an Indian, I have no difficulty in accepting this association
between space and gaze as entirely valid, for akasa (primordial space)
and pratyaksha (direct visual perception) go together both in Hindu
metaphysics and in Sanskrit poetics. I leave it to you to decide whether
the abundant use of visual and illustrative material at this confer-
ence should be interpreted, after Foucault, as a typically European
and positivist concern for the exploration of surfaces, or simply as an
Orientalist nod in the direction of the wisdom of the East.

In so far as the exotic tends, by its very concept, to exclude historical
time, it allows itself to be used as a device to wrench culture out of
history. It can make the unwary observer forget that the exotic blos-
soms on a stem got rooted deeply in that territorial, racial, political
violence which promoted Europe to its ascendancy in the world in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It would be a pity if we saw
nothing other than that historic violence in our study of the exotic. But
it would be equally a shame if we sanitized and de-politicized the exo-
tic and induced ourselves to deal with it as anything other than an
ideological construct.

In insisting on the historicity of the exotic I stand apart not only
from those who wish to treat us only to the perfume of the exotic
and make us forget the stench of the historic brutality at its base, but
also from those who bend in the other direction to dehistoricize it. If
I have any reason at all not to agree in all respects with Edward Said s

440 The Small Voice of History

magisterial thesis on Orientalism, it is only because it loses its historical
specificity for me when it is extrapolated from post-Enlightenment
Europe, from the Europe of Renan and Gobineau as far back as that
of Aeschylus.

Orientalism? I find myself, like many of the other speakers at this
conference, close to identifying the exotic with the Oriental. Is this
simply because Saids great work has conditioned all of us to think of
the two terms as synonymous? Otherwise how is one to explain the
absence of any mention of rhe Middle East, Africa, and Latin America
as the source of Europe's notion of the exotic? To limit the concept to
Europe's interaction with rhe East alone seems to me to impoverish it.
As everybody knows, there was a time when, for Western Europe, the
East began east of the Elbe. It would help me, as a man from the real
East, to gain a sense of space, if the scope of the exotic were expanded
to include a good part of Europe too.

Not at Home in Empire

There is something uncanny about empire. The entity known
by that name is, in essence, mere territory. That is, a place cons-
tituted by the violence of conquest, the jurisdictions of law and
ownership, the institutions of public order and use. And when all the
conquistadors, consuls, and clerks are taken out, there is little left to
it other than a vacancy waiting for armies and bureaucracies to fit it up
once more with structures of power and designate it again as em-
pire. As such, it requires no homes, if only because the authority, the
imperium, from which it derives its form, function, and purpose, is
easily sustained by forts and barracks and offices. Yet as history shows,
empire is not reconciled for long to this abstracted condition. Caravans
seek the shade of the camps, markets their custom in the garrisons,
even religions their flock among war- weary souls. Towns and settlemen ts
grow, as empire too is seized by the urge to make a home of its territory.

However, this is not an urge the modern colonial empire can easily
satisfy. For it rules by a state which does not arise out of the society of
the subject population but is imposed on it by an alien force. This
irreducible and historically necessary otherness was what made im-
perialism so uncanny for its protagonists in South Asia, as witness the
experience of a British officer, Francis Yeats-Brown, who could, with
good reason, describe the first year of his career in the Indian army as
a jolly life’; and yet among these servants and salaams’, he recalled later
on in his memoir, The Lives of a Bengal Lancer ,

442

The Small Voice of History

I had sometimes a sense of isolation, of being a caged white monkey
in a Zoo whose patrons were this incredibly numerous beige race.

Riding through the densely packed bazaars of Bareilly City. . . pas-
sing village temples, cantering across the magical plains that stretched
away to the Himalayas, I shivered at the millions and immensities
and secrecies of India. I liked to finish my day at the club, in a world
whose limits were known and where people answered my beck. An
incandescent lamp coughed its light over shrivelled grass and dusty
shrubbery; in its circle of illumination exiled heads were bent over
English newspapers, their thoughts far away, but close to mine.
Outside, people prayed and plotted and mated and died on a scale
unimaginable and uncomfortable. We English were a caste. White
overlords or white monkeys — it was all the same. The Brahmins made
a circle within which they cooked their food. So did we. We were a
caste: pariahs to them, princes in our own estimation.1

The defining terms of this Englishmans sense of isolation in this
passage are not only ethnic — a ‘beige race' contrasted to one that is
white. The customary coding by colour is mediated here by a sentiment
which could easily have passed as fear were it not for the fact that he
identifies no particular object as frightening. What comes through is
rather an acknowledgement of being overwhelmed by the scale of
things. ‘I shivered’, he writes, at the millions and immensities and
secrecies of India.’ Number, dimension, and depth are all apparently
a measure of the colonizer’s difficulty in coping with the responsibility
called empire. He feels diminished: used to the freedom of the Western
metropolis, he now regards himself as caged in India; born to an open
society, he has his status frozen into a caste-like structure. The empire
has shrunk into an uncanny trap for him, and he seeks refuge in the
club. For that is a surrogate for home. Nearly as small as cage or caste,
it is still a circle of illumination where he can recognize fellow exiles by
their heads bent over English newspapers and their thoughts, like his,
turned to a place far away from this outpost of empire — a place called
home, a world’, as he put it, ‘whose limits were known!’

Limit, says Aristotle, is ‘the terminus of each thing, i.e. the first

1 Francis Yeats-Brown, The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (New York: 1930),
pp. 4-5.

443

Not at Home in Empire

thing outside which there is nothing to be found/2 It is in the nature
of limit, therefore, to define the limited by an operation thar excludes
as much as it includes, and of all possible worlds of known limits there
is none more inclusive, of course, than home. A space of absolute fami-
liarity, it makes the members of a family feel secure by the complete-
ness of their mutual understanding. The club, the Englishmans home
away from home under the Raj, replicated such familiarity to some
extent. For those who gathered there at the end of the day understood
each other by the signs of a shared culture and a common language.
Each of them could say of the others, ‘[they] answered my beck.'

Conversely, India, standing as it did beyond the limit, was an empty,
hence inaccessible, outside. Empty because it had nothing to be
found’ in it for content, and inaccessible because a void is a non-entity
one can hardly get to know and relate to. For a limit, to cite Aristotle
again, is also ‘the substance of each thing' and as such ‘the limit of
knowledge; and if of knowledge, of the object also.'3 Beyond limit,
hence beyond knowing, India was thus the unhomely opposite of
the world of known limits.

Its unknowability for the young soldier was evidently a function
of its immeasurability, as indexed by his reference to its ‘immensities'
as well as to ‘a scale' he found ‘unimaginable and uncomfortable*.
The comfort of a world of known limits derives precisely from the
known measure of things. It does so because measure, despite the
apparent rigidity of its image in the numerical tables of school
arithmetic, is a fluid and indeed necessary process which, according to
Hegel, enables quantity and quality to ‘pass into each other!’4 As such,
it stands for the essential dynamism of things and their relationships.
It is only by understanding the latter that one comports oneself within
a given environment and feels at home in it. Which indeed was why
the empire had turned out to be so uncanny for Yeats-Brown. He could
not find his bearings in a colonial environment where the unimaginable*

2 Aristotle, Metaphysics : Books /, D and E, trans. Christopher Kirwan
(Oxford: 1<>71).

3 Aistotle, Metaphysics , vol. 8 of The Works of Aristotle, trans. W.D. Ross, 2nd
edn (Oxford: 1928), D17.

4 G.W.F. Hegel, Logic, trans. William Wallace (Oxford: 1975), p. 161; see
also pp. 156-61.

444

The Small Voice of History

scale of things was beyond his comprehension. What made him feel so
isolated was not therefore fear predicated on any given object but
simply an indefinite and pervasive anxiety about being lost in empire.

The isolation of rulers from the ruled was integral to the colonial
experience in South Asia. It could hardly be otherwise considering that
the Raj was a dominance without hegemony — an autocracy that ruled
without consent. Isolation was tlicicfore a structural necessity. What
made it worse and difficult to forget was the absurdity of Britain s claim
to have fitted the roundness of colonial autocracy to the squareness
of metropolitan liberalism. A sore that refused to heal, it went on
festering by being compulsively touched. Symptom of an irredeemably
bad conscience, it developed the habit of insinuating itself into all
manner of colonial discourse, ranging from homiletics to politics,
from the novel to the lyric to the common joke.

Yet in Yeats-Brown s memoir we have this pervasive concern presented
to us in an aspect that remains concealed in the standard histories of
the empire. This is not a lacuna which is explained by any shortage of
material, for there is no such shortage. The responsibility lies rather
with historiography itself — with its tendency to misconstrue the
evidence of anxiety simply as fear. In this it allows itself to be uncriti-
cally influenced by the discourse of law and order, which has little use
for the indefiniteness so characteristic of anxiety and assimilates it
readily to fear, if only because the latter offers it the assurance it needs
of a definitive causality to justify itself. Historiography, with its statist
bias, follows suit and reads fear for anxiety.

Consider for instance the following extract from that truly brilliant
work of imperial historiography, John Kayes History of the Indian
Mutiny. Written in the manner of grand narratives of war and revo-
lution, it has a storyline which follows close on the heel of events, as
in Clarendons history of the other great rebellion of two centuries
before, and stops occasionally, like the latter, to allow metonymy to
congeal in reflection. Commenting on the Mutiny at one such stop,
he speaks of it as an event that caught the government of the day en-
tirely by surprise.

In all countries, and under all forms of government, the dangers which
threaten the State, starting in the darkness, make headway towards suc-
cess before they are clearly discerned by the rulers of the land. . . . The

445

Not at Home in Empire

peculiarities of our Anglo-Indian Empire converted a probability into
a certainty. Differences of race, differences of language, differences of
religion, differences of customs, all indeed that could make a great
antagonism of sympathies and of interests, severed the rulers and the
ruled as with a veil of ignorance and obscurity. We could not see or hear
with our own senses what was going on, and there was seldom anyone
to tell us. When by some accident the truth at last transpired, . . . much
time was lost . . . The great safeguard of sedition was to be found in the
slow processes of departmental correspondence . . . When prompt
and effectual action was demanded, Routine called for pens and paper.
A letter was written where a blow ought to have been struck. s

The differences of race, religion, language, and custom which sepa-
rated the colonizer and the colonized are perceived in this passage as
clearly as they are promptly assimilated to a concern for the security of
the state. Of no significance in themselves, they are regarded simply as
a veil of ignorance and obscurity' preventing the rulers from seeing or
hearing ‘what was going on and combating sedition. An instance, par
excellence, of the prose of counterinsurgency, this gives the phenomenon
of isolation an unmistakably disciplinary slant in colonialist historio-
graphy and reduces it into one of fear. For, the lack of information that
made the regime feel so isolated was supposed to have been all about
‘dangers which threaten [ed] the State*. Isolation was identified thus
with fear — the fear of sedition and rebellion. As such it belonged to a
rather different category from what had driven Yeats-Brown to despair.
There was nothing in the latter so specific as a nameable ‘cause of fear
and none that could be dealt with by something so positive as police
intelligence about ‘what was going on !

This is a distinction of some importance — one which we would
suggest, following Kierkegaard, is that between fear and anxiety. The
former, he says, refers to ‘something definite.’5 6 It does so as a state of
mind related to a threat — like that to which all states, including the
colonial state, are subjected, according to Kaye. A threat is detrimental

5 John Kaye, History of the Indian Mutiny of 185/-8, ed. G.B. Malleson,

6 vols (London: 1898), vol. 1, p. 374.

6 Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orient-
ing Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin , trans. and ed. Reidar
Thomte and Albert B. Andersen (Princeton, N.J.: 1980), p. 42; hereafter CA.

446 The Small Voice of History

by its very nature — it harms — and the fear it inspires has its definitive-
ness rooted as much in the character of the region from which the
threat comes as in that of the entity marked out for harming.7 The fear
that haunts the British rulers of India in texts like the one cited above
is something definite in this Heideggerian sense. It originates in a clear-
ly specified region — namely, the civil society of the subject population
and the equally specific object to which the harm is addressed, that is,
the Raj. However, directedness alone is not enough to make a threat
into an agent of fear. It requires the further condition of drawing close
without being actually within striking distance, so that the affect it has
is heightened by a degree of uncertainty on the part of the frightened
(see BT \ pp. 179-80). The alarms and panics of La Grande Peur of
1 789 and the Mutiny of 1 857 were all fearsome precisely because they
were charged with such impendency.

There was little in Yeats-Browns anguish that could be said to be
either directed or impending. We have no idea where it came from, nor
indeed what in particular it sought for its focus. Far from being defi-
nite, it was a phenomenon characterized by a total indefiniteness —
one which the two great thinkers mentioned above have helped us to
diagnose as anxiety. ‘That in the face of which one is anxious is comp-
letely indefinite’, writes Heidegger. This is so in two ways, as he goes
on to explain. ‘Not only does this indefiniteness leave practically un-
decided which entity within-the-world is threatening us, but it also
tells us that entities within the world are not “relevant” at all. The world
has the character of completely lacking in significance. In anxiety one
does not encounter this thing or that thing which, as something
threatening, must have an involvement’ (BT, p. 231).

This is how we read the young officer’s state of mind in the passage
from his memoir cited above. It spoke of no particular entity as the
cause of his isolation. For his sense of isolation carried no threat at all;
it had neither the regionality nor the directionality characteristic of the
latter. It was not that the world around him had ceased to exist. Only
the things that constituted it appeared to signify a nowhere and a

7 See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time , trans. John MacQuarrie and
Edward Robinson (Oxford: 1962), p. 179; hereafter BT. I rely generally on
section 30 of that work for this and related aspects of my argument here.

447

Not at Home in Empire

nothing — an emptiness beyond limit, a nullity rendered incompre-
hensible by a scale of things beyond measure. Such nothing and
nowhere indicate, according to Heidegger, ‘that the world as such is
that in the face of which one has anxiety (BT, p. 231). To be in such a
world is not to be at home in ones environment. ‘In anxiety one feels
“uncanny” ( BT \ p. 233).

Can we afford to leave anxiety out of the story of the empire? For
nearly two hundred years the answer of colonialist historiography to
this question has been one in favour of exclusion. It is not anxiety but
enthusiasm that has been allowed to dominate its narratives. The latter
is a mood which is consonant with all the triumphalist and progres-
sive moments of imperialism — its wars of conquest, annexation, and
pacification in the subcontinent; its interventions in our environment
and our economy by industrialization, monetization, and communi-
cation; its project of social engineering by administrative measures and
its mission of civilizing by education. Its politics of expansion and
improvement, its ethics of courage, discipline, and sacrifice, its aes-
thetics of orientalism have all been assimilated to this mood by a whole
range of rhetorical, analytical, and narratological devices, so that
enthusiasm has come to be regarded as the very mentality of imperialism
itself. The result has been to promote an image of the empire as a sort
of machine operated by a crew who know only how to decide but not
to doubt, who know only action but no circumspection, and, in the
event of a breakdown, only fear and no anxiety. However, the picture
does not look nearly so neat when we step outside official discourse and
meet individual members of that crew agonizing like Yeats- Brown
over the immensity of things in a world whose limits are not known
to them.

During the dying days of the empire the complexities of this pre-
dicament came to be widely known in the words of another Englishman,
George Orwell, who too had gone out to serve the Raj . The importance
of his essay ‘Shooting an Elephant* for our discussion can hardly be
overstated.8 It speaks from a situation which is not quite so aloof as
Yeats-Brown s when he writes of his Indian environment as an outside’

8 See George Orwell, ‘Shooting an Elephant", in Shooting an Elephant and
Other Essays (New York: 1950), pp. 3-12; hereafter ‘SE\

448 The Small Voice of History

of panoramic proportions viewed by a rider on horseback or a pas-
senger out of the window of his railway carriage. In either case, the
scene, described so well in The Lives of a Bengal Lancer is as broad as
it is one that is swiftly passing by, so that the observations, for all their
anguish, maintain a distance from what is observed. It is an alienating
rather than an inviting distance witness to the fact that things have lost
their significance in this world which the observer, in his anxiety, can
apprehend only as an un particularized whole.

By contrast, there is nothing that separates Orwell from his scene.
Indeed the idea of separation would seem to be altogether out of
place in the drama of that mornings events some seventy years ago in
an obscure corner of Britain’s South Asian empire, a small town of
Burma called Moulmein. An elephant in a state of must' had gone
berserk, killed its mahout, destroyed parts of a slum, and was on a
rampage threatening more lives and properties (see \SE\ p. 5). The
police officer, called to help, felt beleaguered as he found some
thousands of the local population closing in to watch him shoot the
beast. Packed with crowds and action, this is not just an outline
sketched hurriedly from afar. To the contrary, the details of an involve-
ment in a fast-approaching danger clutter the text. Yet as the crisis
ticks away, a terrible sense of isolation gathers in the midst of that
tumult, lifts off, and extends beyond the town to all of the empire —
to all that goes by that name territorially as well as conceptually. It
is precisely this unforeseen and somewhat abrupt development that
deflects what might have shaped up as fear from its object and turns
it into an anxiety addressed to nothing in particular — no elephant,
no yellow face which Orwell so intensely dislikes, not even the dilemma
of having to destroy che animal he would rather leave alone.

Indeed, Orwell himself refers to his own state of mind at this crisis
as no ordinary fear. ‘I was not afraid in the ordinary sense’, he writes
OSE’, p. 9). How then is one to understand this being not afraid in
the ordinary sense? Not, we suggest, as an instance of the moral and
political revulsion so conspicuously displayed in the opening paragraphs
of that essay. He had gone to the East, says the author, without know-
ing much about it or what to expect there and was shocked to see how
tyrannical British rule was in South Asia, how cruelly it oppressed its
subjects, and how strongly the latter resented the Raj. All of which he

449

Not at Home in Empire

found perplexing and upsetting — to the point of being haunted by
an intolerable sense of guilt*, hating ‘the dirty work of Empire* he was
appointed to do as a subdi visional police officer in the imperial service,
and about to make up his mind ‘that imperialism was an evil thing
and the sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it the better* (‘SE\
pp. 3, 4, 5). Above all he was as bitter about what seemed to him ‘an
aimless, petty kind of . . . anti-European feeling’ among the natives as
he was about ‘the utter silence . . . imposed on every Englishman in
the East* when it came to criticizing the regime (‘SE’, pp. 3, 4). A
terrible quandary, which he defines as one of being ‘stuck between my
hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little
beasts who tried to make my job impossible' (‘SE\ p. 4).

Years later, when the time came for Orwell to be canonized as a great
advocate of liberty, sentiments like these would be bracketed with the
ideological stance of his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four and regarded as
evidence of his consistent opposition to all tyrannies — Russian as well
as British — and of his unfailing commitment to the ideals of liberalism.
However, a close reading will show that the earlier text, published in
1 956, doesn’t quite measure up to such claims. For one thing, it has no
room in it even for the standard liberal value of racial tolerance. It is
peppered with phrases that speak explicitly of his disapproval of
the Burmese not only for the colour of their skin but for what he obvi-
ously perceived as their cultural and moral inferiority. He describes
them as gutless, venal, lying.9 The youth of the town, with whom he
was apparently not so popular, are referred to as ‘the sneering yellow
faces’ thar met him everywhere, and a crowd of the local poor who had
turned out to see the shooting as a ‘sea of yellow faces above the garish
clothes’ (‘SE’, pp. 3, 7). And this racial loathing is laced with a violence
which loses none of its ugliness even in the confessional rhetoric as
he writes how ‘with one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj
as an unbreakable tyranny . . . [while] with another part I thought that
the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a
Buddhist priest s guts’ (‘SE’, p. 4). Furthermore, what is crucial for our
understanding of his predicament is that his urge for freedom is obvi-
ously not strong enough to inspire him to grasp it when he has a choice

9 See ‘SE’, pp. 3, 5, and 7-8 for assertions and innuendoes to such effect.

450 The Small Voice of History

to do so. Indeed, the importance of this essay for me lies in its candid
documentation of liberalisms failure to act up to its profession of
freedom when the crunch comes.

The misreading of Orwell’s anguish as the simple cry of a liberal
conscience to no small extent owes to a confusion between its two
registers. Unclear about the nature of his own despair, he shifts errati-
cally from one to the other, confusing both himself and the reader in
the process. Yet it is precisely such confusion that dignifies this other-
wise unremarkable belletristic exercise with the authenticity of a moral
dilemma. The two registers have rather different, though mutually
overdetermined, interpretations for their content. Both speak of the
author-officials understanding of his own world but do so from
perspectives which are not quite the same.

One of these, briefly noticed above, concerns the uneasy, doubt-
ridden, yet dutiful British bureaucrat overwhelmed by his sense of
isolation from the people he rules in empires name and hates as a
racially and culturally inferior species who prevent him from properly
doing his job. Yet that job, he knows, stands for ‘the dirty work of
Empire’ — an empire that is oppressive, exploitative, and evil. But the
evil victimizes its own instruments as well. The latter must not demur,
but carry on with their assignments in silence. They have lost their
freedom no less than their subjects, caught between two hatreds — that
of the Raj and of the natives — Orwell speaks for his colleagues as well.
‘Feelings like these’, he says, ‘are the normal by-products of imperial-
ism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you can catch him off duty’ (‘SE’,
p. 4; emphasis added).

In other words, we have an interpretation here of colonial rule in
one of its aspects, which may appropriately be called normal. For all
that is odious about it, it seems to have been absorbed into the ideology
and practice of everyday administration where colonizer and colonized
are locked in routine transactions. The moral and political doubts the
subdivisional police chief has about such transactions are all integral
to and indeed consistent with the normalcy of this world. It is a world
where the Anglo-Indian official is quite at home in his secondary
society — the society of courts, clubs, and bungalows, of tax collection
and pig-sticking and crowd control, of servants and salaams, as Yeats-
Brown had characterized it — a secondary society kept scrupulously

451

Not at Home in Empire

apart from the wider and larger indigenous one. No cry of conscience,
Orwells observations are simply the record of a common, if grumbling,
compliance of the worker ant which carries the grain and the honey of
empire industriously, incessantly, and ever so obediently to its queen.

What however lifts Orwell’s sentiments above the ordinariness of
routine is the other register, where his interpretation of the place he has
in that unhappy but duty-bound world of colonial dominance acquires
a somewhat different spin. Concerned no longer with the feelings
of the generic white official out in the East, it is about a dilemma
whose universality derives from its being all his own. The terms of
this dilemma are known well enough to require no more than a brief
recapitulation. Called upon to deal with the rampaging elephant, he
had armed himself with a gun but realized on closer approach that it
had calmed down and there would be no point in shooting it. How-
ever, a large crowd of onlookers, nearly two thousand strong, had
already gathered there. And suddenly I realized’, he writes, ‘that I
should have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of
me and I had got to do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing
me forward, irresistibly’ (‘SE\ p. 8).

The suddenness of this realization, emphasized further by temporal
markers like glimpse’ and moment’, is what alerts us first to its charac-
ter as a phenomenon of anxiet) (‘SE\ pp. 4, 8). For anxiety*, says
Lacan, ‘is always defined as appearing suddenly, as arising.’10 As such
it is a signal of the shortest possible duration, as short as ‘a blink of the
eye’, which, according to Kierkegaard, is how a moment is expressed
figuratively in his own language, Danish (C4, p. 87). 11 This is an
ancient usage which coincides with its rendering as nimesha (alter-
natively, nimisha) in Sanskrit and goes back to the Vedas within the
Indian tradition. What it signals is an abrupt break with continuity,
with any pre-existing series whatsoever, just as the blink cuts off the

10Jacques Lacan, Freud's Papers on Technique 1953-1 954 , vol. 1 of The Semi-
nar of Jacques Lacan , trans. John Forrester, ed. Jacques -Alain Miller (New York;
1988), p. 68.

11 See the editorial note on this point: ‘The Danish word 0iblikket (the
moment) is figurative in the sense that it is derived from 0iets Bilk (a blink of
the eye). Cf. the German word Augenblick' (CA, p. 245, n. 21).

452

The Small Voice of History

steadiness of a gaze. It is precisely in this least of intervals, which relates
to time as succinctly and economically as the point does to Euclidian
space, that Orwell situates the suddenness of his realization,

And it was at this moment . . . that I first grasped the hollowness, the
futility of the white mans dominion in the East. Here was I, the white
man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd —
seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an
absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces be-
hind. 1 perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant
it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow,
posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the
condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the
natives : and so in every crisis he has got to do what the natives’ expect
of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it. I had got to shoot
the elephant. (‘SF,\ p. 8)

‘This moment’: the nimesha, witness to an interpretation that had
so abruptly translated the sahibs contest with the elephant into a
contest of will between colonizer and colonized, was the signal of an
entirely new realization. As such, it stood for a qualitative leap — a
‘negation of continuity’, as Kierkegaard put it ( CA , p. 129). There was
nothing in it that could be regarded as continuous with the hatred he
had distributed so evenly between imperialism and its victims in the
first register. It would not be possible to transit directly from that to
this other register — the register of anxiety. For, what distinguished
the latter was the suddenness of a leap that ruptured the tediuum
mobile of an imperial administration where conscientious objection
was securely yoked to the routine performance of official chores,
however evil or ignominious these might ha\c been.

The moment of realization, we have noticed, is also described by
Orwell as a ‘glimpse’ — rhat is, as an altogether unexpected disclosure.
Curiously enough, that glimpse of what he calls ‘the real nature of im-
perialism’ turns out, on close inspection, to be rather different from his
initial understanding of empire as a tyranny imposed on the natives
(‘SE’, p. 4). In the register of anxiety, by contrast, the emphasis shifts
to the colonizers own loss of freedom. He has no will of his own
any more and is controlled ‘by the will of those yellow faces behind’.

453

Not at Home in Empire

Trapped in rhe image of rhe sahib fabricated by sahibs themselves
in order to impress the natives, he is now forced to live up to it by doing
what natives expect a sahib to do. They expect him to shoot the ele-
phant. He doesn’t want to shoot it. He must shoot it.

What is clearly at issue in this dilemma is freedom and its possi-
bility, which stares our protagonist, the police official, in the face. The
suddenness of this confrontation unsettles him; its urgency is fraught
with a terror he finds hard to bear. Seized by anxiety, he has to decide
whether to throw off his mask or continue to wear it, to assert his own
will or be guided by that of others, to play or not to play sahib before
rhe natives — in sum, to shoot or not to shoot the elephant.

In the event, as we know, he decided to act as a white man must and
shot the animal. In doing so, he overcame the anxiety of freedom by
coming down firmly on the side of unfreedom — an unfreedom arti-
culated doubly as the natives subjection to colonial rule and the
colonialist s to native expectation about what he must do in order not
to lose face. This was indeed the unfreedom where he was at home as
a functionary of the Raj acting out the official roles assigned to him and
dutifully, if grudgingly, performing his chores. In such a context, the
incident of that morning was nothing other than a signal of the un-
canny calling out to him to step out of the groove and walk away to
freedom. He had heard that call, but a moment s glimpse of the abyss
of possibility was enough to make him recoil from the brink. He chose
to stay where he was, clinging firmly to the homeliness of the routine
and the familiar. The uncanny of empire had frightened Yeats-Brown
by its incomprehensible dimensions, by excesses beyond measure.
Some twenty years on, it was to frighten Orwell by the urgency of its
insistence on freedom . 1 2

The essay ‘Shooting an Elephant’ is therefore no parable of liberal
revolt against colonialism. To the contrary, it demonstrates how a
liberal conscience succumbed to colonial imperatives. Yet in the very
act of doing so, it was singed by anxiety and brought back, however

12 Yeats-Brown mentioned New Years Eve of 1905 as the date of his first
encounter with the uncanny of empire; see Yeats-Brown, The Lives of a Bengal
Lancer , pp. 3-13. Orwell joined the imperial service in Burma about twenty
yearslaterin 1926.

454

The Small Voice of History

momentarily, from its absorption in the familiar world of the sahib.
From that moment the Raj would no longer be the same to it again.
For it had caught a glimpse of freedom in the flash of times passing,
and had known, if only for the duration of a blink, the possibility of
not being at home in empire.

Introducing an Anthropologist
among the Historians

Tf he contents of this volume will have little surprise in store
* for those who have been involved, for any length of time, in the
study of the history and society of colonial and post-colonial
India. For all of us with an active interest in this area, Bernard S. Cohns
writings have been a source of intellectual sustenance for over a quarter
of a century since the early 1960s. We have followed these articles in
academic journals and anthologies as they came out in a steady flow
year after year (though there have been brief periods of drought), cited
them to students and colleagues, and enriched our own understanding
by the information and insights provided by each essay. In the eyes of
many readers, therefore, this collection will acquire the importance of
a retrospecthe display in which the authors erudition and art can be
seen brilliantly at work.

However, it is as true of academic work as of the visual arts that there
is more to a retrospective presentation than the mere sum of its
exhibits. The order imposed on the latter by aggregation and seriality
reveals, in both instances, an identity which is incomprehensible in
terms of its aliquot parts. The dispersal of purpose and meaning which
symptomizes, for each type of oeuvre, the inevitable want of continuity
in its production time is redressed by the unity of narrative time
involved in the textuaiization, so to say, of a show by the spectators

456

The Small Voice of History

gaze, of an anthology by the reader’s. By the same token, each reading
would amount to a deviation from and revision of an original intent
that had been invested by the author in each item of a collection of his
writings. To write an introduction to such a collection is therefore
to act as the first reader (for ‘to introduce’ is, says the Concise Oxford
Dictionary , to come immediately before the start of’) , hence as the very
first traducer. What follows is thus no script for a guided tour but just
one individual reading, the very first of countless transgressions to
which the authors own idea of this work will be subjected in each
subsequent reading.

There was a time when it made no difference to historians and
anthropologists of South Asia that they operated in isolation from each
other within adjacent fields of knowledge. This was so in spite of the
fact that scholars in both the disciplines were often induced by the
logic of their respective crafts to overstep the boundaries. But far from
being a conscious effort at interaction, this appeared within each type
of discourse as an inconsequential, if unavoidable, drift towards the
other, as a conventional nod of little significance rather than a recogni-
tion of epistemological necessity. Witness to this empty gesture, in
anthropology, was the so-called ‘Historical Background’ prefixed to a
dissertation or monograph — a sort of decorative hanging with no
function assigned to it in the ensuing argument. The corresponding
gesture in historiography was the rubric ‘Society and Culture’ which
could include anything from descriptive accounts of indigenous
reformist movements to surveys of official measures illustrative of
‘England’s Work in India .

Since the end of the Second World War it is anthropology, rather
than history, which has led the revolt against the mutual segregation
of the two disciplines within the domain of South Asian studies. Cohn
was not the only rebel; he was one of a number of scholars whose writ-
ings showed unmistakable signs of a rapprochement in this respect.
Some of these were first published during 1951-4 in the Economic
Weekly of Bombay and reprinted soon afterwards in a collection edir-
ed by M.N. Srinivas under the title India's Villages (Calcutta: West
Bengal Government Press, 1955). Taken together with the papers
presented (by Cohn among others) at a seminar organized by Robert
Redfield and Milton Singer at the University of Chicago in the autumn

Introducing an Anthropologist among the Historians 457

of 1 954 and published in McKim Marriott’s Village India (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1955), this material testifies clearly to the
fact that the first generation of anthropologists to do their fieldwork
in rural India returned to their academic bases in the USA and Britain
with an understanding informed by a certain sense of history.

Even those amongst them whose subsequent work, like that of
EG. Bailey, was to take a plunge in the direction of a pure positivity
standing outside time, display in these early essays a sensitivity to the
past that would do any historian proud. Redfield and Singer s comments
on the greatly expanded historical dimension* of Marriott’s view of
Kishan Garhi in his paper published in Village India , his emphasis on
the ‘historical interaction’ between little community and great com-
munity, and the ‘historical depth’ of his description of the religious life
of that village, were a measure of the valorization of history both by the
senior anthropologists and their younger colleagues.

What, however, distinguished Cohn from most ofhis contemporaries
in this regard was his refusal to leave that understanding at the level of
a discursive common sense and his struggle to find a conceptual base
for it, theorize it, and turn understanding into methodology. Both the
title of this volume and the arrangement of its contents speak of that
struggle. By naming it as he does and foregrounding the three essays
which announce his concern about the mutuality of the two disci-
plines, the author has, I think, provided us with an index of his own
development.

That development owes as much to education as to experience. For,
in the first place, one can easily discern in Cohns writings the elements
of a certain tradition which stands, within American anthropology,
for a historicist approach to society and culture. Associated primarily
with the work and ideas of A.L. Kroeber, it sets itself apart from the
tendency to indulge in unverifiable generalizations characteristic of
diffusionism at one extreme and from an obsessive commitment, at the
other, to a microscopic view dealing only with short-term change*. By
contrast, this anthropology studies social and cultural phenomena on
a larger scale and according to their movement within processes of
long-term secular change. During the inter- War period this tradition
was still powerful enough to throw even the great Franz Boas on the
defensive and bring him almost to the point of saying, in a polemic

458

The Small Voice of History

with Kroeber in the pages of the American Anthropologist (1935-6),
that his want of enthusiasm for the historical method was due rather
less to objections on epistemological grounds than to the inadequacy
of evidence, and that in any case he too had used history for his anthro-
pological studies, or why should I have used years of my life>, he asked,
‘in trying to unravel the historical development of social organization,
secret societies, the spread of art forms, of folktales on the Northwest
Coast of America?’1

However, the tide had already turned when, in 1963, Singer,
writing in his foreword to a collection of Kroeber s essays, had ruefully
to acknowledge ‘the microscopic, synchronic study’ as ‘the domi-
nant trend in social anthropology’, even though ‘there has also been a
minority trend which takes history seriously.’2 While many of Cohn’s
contemporaries, with whom he had started out in the 1950s with a
shared sense of history, changed course in favour of the ‘dominant
trend’, he took history seriously enough to adopt it almost as a second
discipline. There might have been something in his intellectual up-
bringing that made him do so: he himself speaks of his ‘educational
background’ and ‘general interests’ as having been ‘of some help in
“passing” as a historian.’3 Or, it might have been simply his professional
association with the Chicago anthropologists that encouraged him to
remain faithful to the ‘minority trend’. Whatever the precise character
of the influence that stimulated and nurtured the historicist strain in
Cohn’s work, there can be no doubt about its affinity with what may
be called the Kroeber tradition in American anthropology.

Kroebers name is invoked here not only because of the striking
similarity between the title ofhis 1957 essay, ‘An Anthropologist Looks
at History’, and that of the present volume — an echoing device in-
tended perhaps to register the author’s tribute to a master who remains
otherwise unacknowledged in these pages. Nor is it simply a matter of
identifying an influence in terms of phrases or metaphors used by both

1 Franz Boas, Race, Language and Culture (New York: Macmillan, 1948),
p. 307.

2 A.L. Kroeber, An Anthropologist Looks at History (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1966), p. x.

3 Cohn, ‘An Anthropologist among the Historians: A Field Study*, p. 2.

Introducing an Anthropologist among the Historians 459

scholars — as, for instance, when Cohns view of anthropological re-
search as ‘based on creating data** indexes a reference to Kroebers
observation that anthropology characteristically “makes” its own
documents’*^ or when his Anthropologyland and Historyland are seen
prefigured in a geography of the mind outlined by his predecessor
thus: ‘I think that most anthropologists would look on history as being
a realm adjoining their own country, speaking a somewhat different
dialect, governed by laws similar in intent though often variant in
detail, and connected by innumerable ties of activity across their
joint frontier.’6

More than anything else, Cohns affinity to the Kroeber tradition
rests on this notion of a joint frontier and its function as the site of
convergence between anthropology and history. One can trace the
emergence of this idea in Kroebers thinking over a period of four
decades. It appears for the first time, but still rather tentatively, in the
1 923 edition of his Anthropology . Here his search of a role for anthro-
pology— a specific task and place in the sun for anthropology’, as he
puts it — ends up by situating it between nature and nurture, at a point
where it can function in close contact with the organic and social
sciences respectively, with biology and history’ in order to untangle
and interpret those phenomena into which both organic and social
causes enter.’7 The question is taken up again rwenty-five years later
when, in the revised edition of that work, the ‘distinctive task for
anthropology’ is still seen as ‘the interpretation of those phenomena
into which both innate organic factors and “social” or acquired factors
enter or may enter.’ But the author elaborates this definition now in
two respects: first, in its scope, as he points out that “social” refers to
both social and cultural phenomena’, and second, in its methodological
implication, which, he says, tilts sociocultural anthropology, distin-
guished clearly from physical anthropology, sharply away from the
specializing procedures of biological science and inclines it towards
history, keeping it occupied with trying to generalize the findings of

4 Ibid., p. 6.

5 Kroeber, Anthropologist , p. 1 60.

6 Ibid., p. 155.

7 A.L. Kroeber, Anthropology (London: Harrap, 1923), pp. 3-4.

460

The Small Voice of History

history.’8 Such elaborations lead eventually to that integrated view of
his later years in which culture, history, and anthropology are brought
together as inseparably related moments of a common project. With-
in that project, ‘Culture is the common frontier of anthropology
with historiography’, and the two disciplines are seen as working to-
gether in order to ‘interweave all data on culture into a history of
human culture.’9

Clearly, this view of the relation between history and anthropology
was not the only one available on that subject to a young scholar who,
like Cohn, was about to get started on an academic career in the social
sciences during the 1950s. Within American anthropology this view
was pitted against the positivist and scientistic tendency which had
already come to dominate anthropological research by this time. As a
tendency in which the anti-historicist bias of structural-functionalism
had fused with the Boasian predilection in favour of the specific, the
diverse and the small-scale,10 it pulled in a direction contrary, indeed
hostile, to the Kroeber tradition. At this hour of high enthusiasm it was
to physics rather than history that social anthropology looked for its
inspiration. And outside the United States, too, the historicist approach
was having a rough time. In France the old debate, associated not so
long ago with Durkheim’s work, flared up again in the context of the

8 Ibid., pp. 3-4.

9 Kroeber, Anthropologist \ p. 164.

10 Cohn refers to an epistemological assumption’ in Boasian culture theory
to the effect that ‘anthropology was really a form of “history”.’ (‘History and
Anthropology: The State of Play’, p. 23.) It is interesting to recall, in this con-
nection, that Kroeber and L^vi-Strauss have both observed that Boas’s uneasy
relationship with the past did not quite amount to a grasp of history. According
to the former, ‘He rarely developed historical problems of temporal sequence . . .
He brought in the specific past where he saw its bearing on specific present
problems; but he remained without much impulse to infer or reconstruct the
larger past of culture . . . ’ Kroeber, Anthropologist , p. 109. And Ldvi-Strauss
writes: ‘When Boas is successful, his reconstructions amount to true history —
but this is a history of the fleeting moment ... a microhistory , which can
no more be related to the past than can the macrohtstory of evolutionism
and diffusionism.' C. Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (New York; Basic
Books, 1963), p. 9.

Introducing an Anthropologist among the Historians 46 1

structuralist intervention with Ldvi-Strauss recommending, in effect,
that the two disciplines should work together but separately, for they
share the same subject, which is social life; the same goal, which is
a better understanding of man; and, in fact, the same method, in
which only the proportion of research techniques varies ; and yet ‘they
differ, principally, in their choice of complementary perspectives:
History organizes its data in relation to conscious expressions of so-
cial life, while anthropology proceeds by examining its unconscious
foundations.’11

Faced with such alternatives, Cohn had evidently decided to swim
with the Kroeber current. Not an easy swim, and he could be caught
up in an undertow, to be pulled now in one direction, now in another,
as witness the strong synchronic orientation — strong enough to over-
come the resistance generated by some key Rcdfieldian concepts — in
the essay written jointly with Marriott as opposed to the undiluted
historicism of the well-known essay on the initial impact of British rule
in the Banaras region.12 By and large, however, he keeps moving in
midstream where anthropology and history converge on the study of
culture, and sums up that experience in an agenda for anthropological
history where the centrality of culture is clearly acknowledged. Thus,
he writes:

The black boxes of anthropological history are the concepts of event,
structure and transformation . . . To classify phenomena at a common-
sense* level is to recognize categories of events coded by the cultural
system. An event becomes a marker within the cultural system.13

The units of study in anthropological history should be cultural
and culturally derived: power, authority, exchange, reciprocity, codes
of conduct, systems of social classification, the construction of time
and space, rituals. One studies these in a particular place and over time,
but the study is about the construction of cultural categories and the
process of that construction, not about place and time.14

11 L^vi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology y p. 18.

12 Cohn, ‘Networks and Centres in the Integration of Indian Civilization';
‘The Initial British Impact on India: A Case Study of the Benares Region'.

13 Cohn, ‘History and Anthropology. The State of Play’, p. 45.

14 Ibid., p. 47.

462

The Small Voice of History

Historical anthropology then will be the delineation of cultures, the
location of these in historical time through the study of events which
affect and transform structures, and the explanation of the consequences
of these transformations. 1 5

It is difficult not to notice the family resemblance between such
formulations and Kroebers view on that subject, such as when he ob-
serves, ‘Civilizations are construable as precipitates of the events of
history.’16 However, once these similarities are acknowledged and
Cohn is situated within a particular tradition of American anthropology,
the character and extent of his divergence too becomes quite explicit.
For, with all his affinities, he manages to sidestep much of the
Kroeberian metaphysics of holism, patternism’, acculturation, and
universalism, and strikes a path which is all his own.17 He does so by
choosing the power relations of colonialism as the main discursive
field for his anthropological history and by recognizing the ‘joint
frontier of the two knowledges as one that is constituted by politi-
cal culture.

The complicity of colonialism and the social sciences is nowhere
more explicit than in anthropology. For, as Lcvi-Strauss has observed,
‘It is the outcome of a historical process which has made the larger part
of mankind subservient to the other. During this process millions of
innocent human beings have had their resources plundered and their
institutions and beliefs destroyed, whilst they themselves were ruthlessly
killed, thrown into bondage, and contaminated by diseases diey were
unable to resist. Anthropology is daughter to this era of violence.’18
For anthropologists of Cohns generation that historical process had
culminated in the supreme violence of the Second World War, with
some of the colonialist powers of Western Europe being themselves
colonized for a time by one of their number and some of the Asian

15 Cohn, Anthropology and History in the 1980s; Towards a Rapproche-
ment’, p. 73.

16 Kroeber, Structural Anthropology, p. 164,

17 For Cohns critique of some of rbese Kroeberian notions, see ‘History and
Anthropology: The State of Play’, pp. 22, 25-6.

18 C. L^vi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, vol. 2 (Harmondsworth: Penguin
Books, 1978), pp. 54 --5.

Introducing an Anthropologist among the Historians 463

peoples throwing oft' the colonial yoke in the midst of revolutions
and civil wars. The colonial encounter, so germane to anthropology,
was dramatized for Americans when, writes Cohn, suddenly in 1942
[they] had to confront “the others” on an unprecedented scale, and the
concept of culture was drafted to help the war effort/ 19 And immediately
after the War the continuing strategic, economic and political interests
of the United States involved the discipline in the so-called area pro-
grammes as anthropologists responded to this idea of areal knowledge
by adapting their traditional method, field work ... to the challenge
of studying great civilizations/20

The great civilization5 Cohn had set out to srudy was, on its
part, caught up in the most serious crisis of its career — the crisis of
decolonization. For, during his student days, in 1 949-54, South Asian
society was still quite vividly and painfully scored by the effects of war,
famine, and the Quit India movement, compounded by those of the
Partition riots, refugee exodus, and the transfer of power. No contemp-
orary development was comprehensible without a recall of this trauma
which mediated all that w as in the making by all that had been, all the
evolving present and future of an independent India by its colonial
past. Thus the anthropologist had history thrust upon him, and the
object of his study, the spatial other, was thoroughly penetrated by the
temporal other.21 The strength arid distinction of Cohns work lie in
the fact that unlike some of his professional colleagues he did not
pretend that an interpenetration of this order had not occurred, or that
it would go away if only one kept ones head buried in a synchronic
dune on a microscopic site. On the contrary, he confronted the

19 Cohn ‘History and Anthropology: The State of Play, p. 26.

20 Ibid., p. 27.

2 1 ‘Historians and anthropologists have a common subject matter, “otherness”;
one field constructs and studies “otherness” in space, the other in time’, writes
Cohn in ‘History and Anthropology: The State of Play , p. 19. L^vi-Strauss,
too, has observed in much the same way: ‘Both history and ethnography are
concerned with societies other than the one in which we live. Whether this
otherness is due to remoteness in time (however slight), or to remoteness in
space, or even to cultural heterogeneity, is of secondary importance com-
pared to the basic similarity of perspective/ Ldvi-Strauss, Structural Anthropo-
logy, p. 16.

464

The Small Voice of History

problem directly as a question of power articulated in the historical
relationship of rulers and the ruled.

In the 1950s that question could nowhere be studied to better
advantage than in Uttar Pradesh (UP). Thanks to its importance as the
traditional power base of the ruling Congress Party and the personal
power base of its charismatic leader Jawaharlal Nehru, its proximity to
Delhi and sensitivity to shifts in the complex political alignments at
the capital, and its privileged position as the beneficiary of all that the
rulers did for their constituents at the uppermost levels of the regional
society, this was a part of India where an observer could document and
assess the small-scale structures and movements of rural and urban
power relations more easily and comprehensibly than perhaps anywhere
else in the subcontinent at this time. By choosing a village in that state
for his fieldwork (or was the choice, I wonder, made for him, as is often
done for most research students, by the contingencies of supervision,
funding, and orientation of undergraduate courses?) Cohn acquired
for himself a ringside view of the contemporary play between the old
and the new in time, and between the local and the national in space.

His perception of one of the critical moments of that drama is re -
corded here in his studies of the agrarian problem. He was by no means
the only scholar to address this question, for it recurs often as a theme
of much academic writing, especially in dissertations and monographs
on economic history, during the two decades after Independence.
Most of this was stimulated no doubt by the impact of the Zamindari
Abolition Act on the economy and society of rural UP and consequendy
on the political behaviour of its country electorates — a matter which
was then of considerable interest to social scientists, as witness the
numerous discussions of voting behaviour in the contemporary litera-
ture on Indian politics and anthropology. But in Cohns work these
agrarian changes served as a cue not for psephology, but, characteristi-
cally, for history. The first phase of post-colonial India reminded
him, in this respect, of the inauguration of colonial rule. ‘The only
comparable period of rapid social and economic change that Pastern
UP went through, he wrote in 1 960, was during the first twenty years
of British rule from 1795 to 1815. 22

22 Cohn, ‘Madhopur Revisited’, p. 305.

Introducing an Anthropologist among the Historians 465

Readers will find many references to that period in these pages, and
especially in the two magisterial surveys (‘The Initial British Impact on
India: A Case Study of the Benares Region and ‘Structural Change in
Indian Rural Society’) of the nature and effects of the reorganization
of landed property in the Banaras region under the Raj. Each of these
is a fine example of the historian s craft: in its compilation, interrogation,
and use of evidence (the second of the two essays mentioned above
is a tour de force in this sense), and in its skill of combining a long
narrative line with probing analysis. But even more than these, it is the
kind of questions which the author asks that lends these studies their
particular distinction. For, in the 1960s when they were written,
exercises of this genre were still mainly concerned with the administrative
and economic aspects of British land revenue policy. Cohn's work
breaks new ground in two respects. In the first place, unlike most other
scholars engaged at this time in the study of the revenue history of
UP, he works on a regional rather than a provincial scale, and I see in
this an attempt to combine the social anthropologists preference for
spatial concentration with the historians for a view of secular change.
Secondly, his account of the ‘extensive and melancholy revolution in
the landed property of the country' goes much further than most other
exercises in its application of the anthropological method to history as
he formulates a part of his problematic in terms of the relation of
landed property to lineage territory and connects the phenomenon of
land alienation to caste and community structures in a brilliantly
executed series of case studies. A great deal that has happened during
the last fifteen years in the orientation and content of research on
Indian social history testifies to the influence of his pioneering work.

If the changes brought about by colonial rule in the structure of
landed property are noticed in these essays as a record of seismic
movements in the material base of Indian society, the intrusion of
British law represents here a corresponding movement in the super-
structure. The two are by no means unrelated. On the contrary, they
figure in Cohns work as complementary and essential conditions for
the emergence ofacolonial state, ‘One of the first problems confronting
a colonial power after establishing de facto or de jure sovereignty
over a new territory is’, according to him, ‘to set up procedures for
setding disputes arising within the dominated society, and to establish

466

The Small Voice of History

a whole range of rights in relation to property and obligations of indi-
viduals and groups to one another and to the state/23 Since the prob-
lem is central to Cohns interest in the early history of colonial state
formation in South Asia, he returns to it again and again in his essays,
and especially in three of those which are addressed to that particular
theme in this volume. Read together as closely related parts of a single
intervention, they have a good deal of insight to offer into the manner
and substance of his argument.

In manner, they demonstrate how history and anthropology are
made to work together in the development of his argument. One of the
essays, ‘From Indian Status to British Contract’, is written in the
historical mode, and another, ‘Anthropological Notes on Disputes and
Law in North India , in the anthropological. The third, ‘Some Notes
on Law and Change in North India, published in 1959 and chronologi-
cally the first of the series, shows clearly where one mode takes over
from the other as the author interrupts the description of dispute
settlement in the ‘little kingdom’ of his part of rural UP to say, ‘Thus
far I have been writing as if the village and little kingdom were un-
changing isolated units, unaffected by outside events in North Indian
society. Obviously this was not the case . . . The description I have
given is an abstraction and to some extent a caricature; . . . since the
establishment of British rule in the late eighteenth century, a number
of developments have markedly changed the relationships within the
village/ At this point in the relay of the argument the baton can be seen
clearly to pass on from anthropology to history. Here, it seems to me,
synchrony has used a coiled abstraction in order to release and deploy
the force of diachrony to greater effect. The emphasis on the moments
of relative isolation and changelessness does not amount, in my
reading, to a ‘caricature* at all (as the author suggests in self-deprecation) ,
but to a necessary and successful discursive strategy for the representation
of change caused by colonial rule.

In this essay, as in the other two of this group, that change is said to
have been epitomized by law at the level of culture. Law was the site
where the indigenous culture of dominance and subordination, as it
was expressed in the local institutions and procedures of dispute

23 Cohn, ‘From Indian Status to British Contract’, p. 463.

Introducing an Anthropologist among the Historians 467

settlement, came into contact with the political culture of colonialism
articulated, at the level of the state, in the judicial apparatus and legal
processes of the Raj as well as in its supra-local laws and regulations.
The result, says Cohn, was a conflict of values. There was nothing in
their own ideals and practices relating to law and justice that could
make Indians understand and put to a proper use such British 'jural
postulates' as the notion of equality in the eyes of the law, the difference
between contract and status, the importance of delimiting adjudication
to one case at a time without any regard for its antecedents, the need
for positive decisions, and so on.24 The confusion created for the colo-
nized by the operations of a legal system based on such postulates was
further compounded by the deficiencies of the colonizers themselves
as ‘the British judges struggled with inadequate training, lack of
knowledge and/or sympathy with Indians and Indian culture, poorly
written laws, a court procedure alien to the people who used it, perjury,
forgery, corrupt assistants, and the vexation of a difficult climate and
being cut off from their home society.’25 The outcome of all this was
a clash of cultures, which was symptomatic of a fundamental contra-
diction in the power relations of the colonial system itself.

It is my thesis [writes Cohn] that the present altitude of the Indian
peasant was an inevitable consequence of the British decision to estab-
lish courts in India patterned on British procedural law. The way a peo-
ple settles disputes is part of its social structure and value system.
In attempting to introduce British procedural law into their Indian
courts, the British confronted the Indians with a situation in which
there was a direct clash of the values of the two societies; and the
Indians in response thought only of manipulating the new situation
and did not use the courts to settle disputes but only to further them.26

The study of law thus leads Cohn to the historic paradox of colonial-
ism— the paradox that law, intended to serve as a basic defining prin-
ciple of colonial rule, indeed as a primary signifier of British dominance

24 For the authors observations made to this effect, see Cohn, ‘Some Notes
on Law and Change in North India and ‘Anthropological Notes on Disputes
and Law in North India’, passim,

25 Cohn, ‘From Indian Status to British Contract’, p. 476.

26 Cohn, ‘Some Notes on Law and Change in North India’, p. 569.

468

The Small Voice of History

in the subcontinent corresponding in function and structure to the
hegemonic signifier of Rule of Law in metropolitan Britain, became
itself an instrument of misunderstanding about the very nature of
that dominance. Caught up in this paradox, the two constituents
of the colonial power relationship would henceforth simply go on
reciprocating a mutual miscognition, reproducing the distortions
of the rulers knowledge of the ruled, and vice versa, in a discourse
without end.

Law' emerges thus from these studies wearing the sahibs topee
rather than the judge’s wig, travesti, , so to say, as the figure of a historic
travesty — the travesty of colonialist knowledge. But it was not the only
epistemic formation to bend in the light of that concave universe of
power. There is a recognition in Cohns writings, almost from the very
beginning, that the colonizers knowledge of the colonized was not and
could never be neutral to the relation of dominance and subordination
which bound them together. This connection is noticed again and
again in many of the essays written in the years 1959-68. He describes,
documents, and analyses it, sometimes in passing and sometimes in
the substantive part of an argument. It is a matter he never allows to
slip out of purview. On the contrary, it features in his discussion of
every important aspect of colonial rule — whether it relates to the ques-
tion of landed property or administration of justice, caste structure or
recruitment to the bureaucracy. These exercises culminate in the well-
known ‘Notes on the History of the Study of Indian Society and
Culture* (1968), where he demonstrates how an official view of caste,
a Christian missionary view of Hinduism, and an Orientalist view of
Indian society as a static, timeless, spaceless* and internally undifferen-
tiated monolith (a condition which was to be theorized a decade later
by Edward Said) were all produced by the complicity of knowledge
and power.

It is hardly possible not to notice the idea of anthropological history
already prefigured in this recognition of complicity. For colonialism
which exemplifies, for the author, the liaison of knowledge and powet,
is acknowledged by him as ‘one of the primary subject matters of an
historical anthropology or an anthropological history.’ By adopting
the ‘historical mode*, he says, anthropology shifts away ‘from the ob-
jectification of social life to a study of its constitution and construction

Introducing an Anthropologist among the Historians 469

in culture. And since the process of cultural construction is best
studied through representations — those situations, to follow Dur-
kheim, in which some members of society represent their theories and
systems of classifications and constructs to themselves and others , the
colonial situation must be regarded as an ideal field for such studies.
Anthropological history will thus develop as a study of political cul-
ture, a culture of power relations, constructed by the interaction of
colonizer and colonized in the specific form of the self-representation
of each to the other.

Anthropological ‘others’ are part of the colonial world [writes CohnJ.
In the historical situation of colonialism, both white rulers and indi-
genous peoples were constantly involved in representing to each other
what they were doing. Whites everywhere came into other peoples
worlds with models and logics, means of representation, forms of
knowledge and action, with which they adapted to the construction of
new environments, peopled by new ‘others’. By the same token those
‘others’ had to restructure their worlds to encompass the fact of white
domination and theii own powerlessness.27

It follows, therefore, that according to this approach the interpene-
tration of power and knowledge constitutes the very fabric of colo-
nialism. They generate and susrain each other in a relationship of
mutuality which does not allow itself to be viewed either as a case of
‘culture contact* or ‘impact’, or as a phenomenon to be treated in terms
of a methodology that seeks to sort what is introduced from what is
indigenous.’28 This methodological point is of the utmost significance
for our understanding of Cohns own development. For, by affirm-
ing it, he distances himself quite clearly from his previous position,
where it was precisely in these terms that the collusion of knowledge
and power had been viewed so far in most of his work. Thus, that
important discussion of ‘value conflict’ in ‘Some Notes on Law and
Change in North India* (1959) was evidently based on a distinction
between the ‘introduced* and ‘indigenous* elements in each aspect of
that conflict, as shown below in the author’s own words:

27 Cohn, ‘History and Anthropology: The State of Play, p. 44.

28 Ibid.

470

The Small Voice of History

Introduced

‘Basic to British law is the idea
of equality of the individual
before the law’

‘decisions of the court based on
ideas of contract1

‘Central to British law is the
necessity of a decision1

‘The British court . . . can deal
only with the specific case
presented by the contending
parties’

Indigenous

‘North Indian society operates
on the reverse value hypothesis:
men are not born equal1

‘Indian peasant society . . .
largely dominated by values
surrounding the concept of status1

‘the indigenous adjudication
procedure of India is geared to
postponing a clear-cut decision
as long as possible1

‘A specific case does not stand
alone, but is usually part of a
string of disputes1

These distinctions are summarized in almost identical terms some
years later in ‘Anthropological Notes on Disputes and Law in North
India1.29 However, when he returns to the question of the relationship
of law and state after the lapse of over a decade, it is by an altogether
different route. That relationship is now studied not so much in terms
of the pragmatics of adjudication as in those of an epistemological
intervention in the form of a cultural construct. Knowledge of various
kinds helps in this construct, but Orientalism, which was hitherto
regarded as only one of several idioms and associated, on the whole,
with a set of ideas and attitudes peculiar to some individuals and
institutions like William Jones and the Fort William College, assumes
now a central, indeed paradigmatic importance as the colonial-
ist knowledge par excellence . Above all, law, thus construed, emerges
clearly as an integral moment of the British perception of their own
status as that of rulers and civilizers, and of the Indians' view of them-
selves as a subject people.

These and some of the other ideas which inform Cohns most recent
approach — the approach of anthropological history - to questions of
law and state in colonial India may be seen at work in the following

29 See Cohn, pp. (>09ff. in Anthropological Notes on Disputes and Law in
North India1.

Introducing an Anthropologist among the Historians 47 1

extracts taken from two essays (one of them, alas* not included in this
volume) written since 1980.

In 1772 Warren Hastings, Governor of Bengal . . . decided as part of
a plan for the governance of this territory that the East India Company’s
courts would administer Hindu law for Hindus and Muslim law for
Muslims. This decision had ramifying consequences which eventu-
ally led to the notion that Indian civilization was founded on particular
Sanskrit texts. By the middle of the nineteenth century these were con-
ceived to be the very embodiment of an authentic India. The idea of
the primacy of the Sanskritic component in Indian civilization then
became the determinant of action, policy and structure, not only for
the rulers but for many of the ruled. What had been fluid, complex,
even unstructured, became fixed, objective, tangible.

The establishment of such a cultural construct has a duration
and chronology of its own, related to but often independent of other
constructs. What had been a decision taken at a particular time, for
what the actors thought to be pragmatic reasons and which is therefore
explicable in those terms, had a consequence which wholly transcend-
ed its origins. What had been a dependent variable — the result of an
action through time — became an independent variable and the deter-
minant of action.30

Hastings was to encourage a group of younger servants of the Com-
pany to study the classical’ languages of India, Sanskrit, Persian and
Arabic, as part of a mixed scholarly and pragmatic project aimed at
creating a body of knowledge which could be utilized in the effective
control of Indian society. What Hastings was trying to do was to enable
the British to define what was Indian and to create a system of rule
which would be congruent with what was thought to be indigen-
ous institutions. Vet this system of rule was to be run by Englishmen
and had to take into account British ideas of justice, and the proper
discipline, forms of deference and demeanour, which should mark the
relations between rulers and ruled.31

The notion of anthropological history may thus be said to be sympto-
matic of an epistemological shift in Cohns own work. A shift, rather

30 Cohn, ‘History and Anthropology: The State of Play’, pp. 46-70.

31 Bernard S. Cohn, ‘Law and the Colonial State in India’ (unpublished,
1985). I am grateful for the authors permission to quote from this paper.

472

The Small Voice of History

than a break or a leap, it operates more like a process of tearing away,
with some of the ligaments still dripping with ideas pertaining to a
previous theoretical stance, as the argument, in his most recent writ-
ings, uses the new concept to open up important and unexplored vistas
on the much-surveyed site of caste structure and census classification,
as in ‘The Census, Social Structure and Objectification in South Asia’

( 1 984) , or recover and assemble h i rher to unresearched archival material
to generate brilliant insights into the semiotics of imperialism, as in
‘Representing Authority in Victorian India (1983). To acknowledge
this complex movement in Cohns orientation — an epistemic
reorientation of increasing importance for his work — is to appreciate
the value of this retrospective collection as more than the sum of
its itemized contents. For what these add up to is the record of an
intellectual development.

That development augurs well for South Asian studies. It undermines
the narrow, positivist approach to colonialism in terms of a study of
its institutional structure alone. By demonstrating the complicity of
knowledge and power, it also shows how hollow it is to credit the
ideological apparatus of British rule in the subcontinent with the
virtues of an altruistic intervention. Above all, it affirms the character
of the Indian past as an open text amenable to an infinite number
of new readings. For colonialism, conceptualized by anthropologi-
cal history ‘as a situation in which the European colonialist and the
indigene are united in one analytic field’,32 corresponds, in discursive
terms, to the unity of writer and reader in a textual field. The ‘analytic
field’, where the colonizer and the colonized unite in an exchange of
mutual self-representation, is constituted by differences insofar as each
party is engaged in addressing its other, and the disciplines of history
and anthropology, fused now in anthropological history, introduce
their own differential representations as they investigate the pheno-
mena of temporal and spatial otherness in that field. This is one of
those instances where ‘we are dealing’, as Ldvi-Strauss has observed,
‘with systems of representations which differ for each member of the
group and which, on the whole, differ from the representations of the
investigator.’33 Consequently, meaning emerges from this field out of

32 Cohn, ‘History and Anthropology: The State of Play*, p. 44.

33 L^vi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, p. 16.

Introducing an Anthropologist among the Historians 473

the relativities of an infinite variance, just as it does from the countless
number of possible readings of any given text.

Anthropological history, if it remains faithful to this concept of a
relativity of representation within the cultural construct of colonialism,
will make it impossible for its meaning to be scooped out and ex-
hausted by any singular reading on the part of individuals, ideologies,
or institutions. If this fusion of the two great academic disciplines
succeeds in developing investigative and narrative methods which are
adequate to its concept, it will textualrze the historic experience of
colonialism and generate what Barthes has called a kind of metony-
mic skid’, so that each operation, even as it nominates a theme for itself,
will by that very act constitute and posit another.34 The sanctity of
all established rubrics of course-work teaching and research will be
violated again and again by the impact of that expanding nomination .
There will be no end to the questioning and thematization of the
colonial past, no contain ing of that irrepressibly plural text within the
departmental boundaries of any particular reading. Bernard S. Cohns
work points thus towards a direction where a robust hedonism of the
mind will again animate the field of South Asian studies by a new sense
of wonder and the play of an insatiable doubt.

34 Roland Barthes, S/Z (London: Cape, 1975), pp. 42-3.

The Authority of Vernacular Pasts

To speak of vernacular pasts as the object of historiography is
already to problematize the latter, since a past designated as
vernacular can hardly find its place in historical discourse
except in an alternative mode, that is, the mode of an alternative to
non- vernacular historiography. Situated thus, its alterity takes its stand
at once within a relationship of power. For, the Latin verna inheres in
the phrase Vernacular like memory in a microchip. It is the memory
of an ancient subjugation: verna means, among other thing, a home-
born slave’.

In English usage the phrase Vernacular’ had of course redeemed
itself by erasing servitude to some extent from its connotation and
reducing the latter primarily to what was indigenous. However, the
stigma did not rub off without a trace. It was not only that the awk-
wardness of the Latin showed through from time to time in such
instances as the one listed for 1804 in the Oxford English Dictionary
where it spoke of A disposition to use kindly, and to emancipate
frequently, the vernacular slave.’ But that was before emancipation, as
witness the date. Far more relevant for the South Asian experience was
the palimpsest which lingered throughout the Raj. No moral contrition
was to inhibit the phrase from circulating here with the sense of
bondage still somewhat intact. To borrow a Freudian metaphor, it was
as if some mnemic traces of servitude, suppressed by a liberal conscience

Copyright © 1 99 1 Ranajit G uha. Hitherto unpublished paper first presented
to the Pacific and Asian History Seminar of the Australian National University,
Canberra, October 1991; first publication herein.

475

The Authority of Vernacular Pasts

in its native constituency, had managed to re-surface on ‘the mystic
writing-pad* of power as soon as imperialism cathected in conditions
specific to colonial rule. Apparently, the structures of dominance
peculiar to Britain’s Eastern empire licensed a signification for which
the word had little use left in its metropolitan career.

For in India ‘vernacular* established itself as a distancing and supre-
macist sign which marked out its referents, the indigenous languages
and cultures, as categorically inferior to those of the West and of Eng-
land in particular. A keyword in the management of a vast system of
colonial education, it upheld, by every utterance, the power, value, and
status of a white civilization that was other than and therefore
presumed to be superior to what was vernacular.

A salient aspect of that education had to do with the teaching and
writing of history, and this helped further to make the discrimination
between metropolitan and vernacular integral to Anglo-Indian historio-
graphy. The metropolitan bias was the defining principle of James
Mill’s project to annex the Indian past as a portion of British hist-
ory. Which meant, first, a representation of the pre-colonial past as
preparatory to an eventual and almost providential outcome in the
form of British paramountcy in the subcontinent, and secondly, the
production of a narrative genre to write up the history of the Indian
people as the story of ‘England’s Work in India.

There is much evidence to show that this historiography, like the
design of education itself, was meant to convince the colonized of the
goodness of colonial rule and the importance of collaborating with it.
Its aim, in short, was to persuade Indians in favour of the regime and
promote its hegemony. They, on their part, responded by an earnest
imitation of the colonialist model in their history manuals and other
pedagogical literature published in the early years of the nineteenth
century. The very first exercises in vernacular historiography, these
were true to their name. For, like the home-born slave, these too
were indigenous as well as servile: written in a native language, these
had adopted as their content a purely imperialist view of the history of
those on whom the empire had imposed itself only by right of con-
quest. As such, this discourse was authentically vernacular in concept —
the discourse of a happy slave, that is, of a slave so toell reconciled
to the masters hegemony as to bear ungrudgingly with a vernacular

476

The Small Voice of History

fate. The initial moment of vernacular history was thus already in-
corporated in a hegemonic and masterful view of the past that was not
the vernas own.

Indeed, for a born slave there was no past of ones own to speak of.
As an object owned, a mere property, his past existed only so far as did
the proprietors. All he could do, to start with, was, therefore to
recapitulate the masters story and tell it as he had been told. Yet
this retelling made for a difference. For the story could no longer be
told exactly as the master had set it up. Because it was told not in the
master s language but the slave s, not in the colonizers language but
in the mother tongue of the colonized, there was nothing smooth or
comfortable about this transposition. Its violence subjected the
body of the narrative to a shudder that left none of its nuances,
values, associations, and contests standing where they had been in the
original.

Displacements of this order are of course common to all acts of
translation. As a text is relayed by one language to another the latter
assimilates it only to the extent that the material and energies which
make for its individuality and distinguish it from the other language,
permit the text to be modified. Hence the insistence of hermeneutics
that to translate is to interpret under any circumstance whatsoever. But
if the speech communities involved in the transaction happen to be
related as dominant and subordinate, the structural modifications
made by the receiving language are likely to be overdetermined by the
given relations of power.

That is how vernacular history in India came to serve for a vehicle
of incipient nationalism which was still loyalist and at peace with
British rule for most of the nineteenth century. But such loyalism,
content to recycle what colonialist historiography had been churning
out as an Indian past, was soon contaminated by a touch of self-respect.
This self-respect was to insinuate itself into journals and school books
and historical novels and plays variously as an idealization of pre-
colonial society and culture, as encomia for rajas and rebels who
had fought the British and lost, and even as a reflection on the re-
lative merits of Western imperialism and ancient Hindu polity with
the latter ranked higher by a grade or two. For the subordinate to insist
thus on self-respect is of course to undermine the very foundations of

477

The Authority ofVernacular Pasts

dominance and it would not be long before an eminent nationalist
author was publicly to declare that British writing on the Indian past
was neither competent nor fair. He called on his compatriots to write
their own history.

That was a call of nationalism with implications both for the dis-
course of history and the overarching discourse of power. For Indians
could undertake to write their own history only on two conditions.
They could do so, first, by conceptualizing the ethnically and cultural-
ly diversified populations of the subcontinent as a unity called nation.
This condition could still be satisfied without altering the given
relations of power, since the elitist and collaborative nationalism of the
time had little objection to Britain’s claim to have conferred nationhood
on India by virtue of administrative unification.

The problem however was that the investment of native languages
into a new kind of narration called history was to have consequen-
ces nobody had foreseen. For these languages began to act as a sort of
reagent on the very chemistry of the past, so that facts ignored or
misrepresented by colonialist writers would henceforth combine with
nostalgia and mythopoeia to generate the notion of an originary and
organic nationhood antecedent to British rule. An Indian historiography
powered by such a mixture of information and vision could poison the
ethos of hegemony by sighs for a purloined past it could develop into
an inconsolable critique which would measure the achievement of the
Raj against millennial glories and find it wanting. More ominously,
it could stimulate dreams of power incompatible with subjection to
alien rule.

The other condition for an authentic Indian historiography was
that it should enable a nationalist discourse to integrate all the dis-
parate pasts of India into a single national past. But the agenda ran into
difficulty on this score as well. For how could any nationalist discourse
presume to speak for the myriad vernacular pasts so long as there was
no singular nationhood that could claim to have absorbed all of civil
society? No wonder that vernacularity, an autochthon of the depths of
civil society, was unimpressed. It was obviously in no great hurry to
dissolve itself in a totalizing nationalism. On the contrary, it proved
stubborn enough to carry on with its role of informing the relationship
of rulers and the ruled within the colonial state as well as the structures

478 The Small Voice of History

of dominance and subordination within the indigenous society. The
subaltern in caste, class, and gender would continue for a long time
yet to speak of their own pasts within these structures in dialects which
were conspicuous by indifference to the lingua franca of monistic na-
tionalism.

The writs of these pasts ran within strictly local jurisdictions
beyond the pale of the Raj and the nationalist kingdom-come. The
accents, idioms, and imageries which characterized them were foreign
to the lexicon of post-Enlightenment reason that provided historio-
graphy and nationalism with much of their distinctive vocabulary.
They defied generic incorporation into historical discourse and were
put into words by genealogists, balladeers, storytellers, and wise old
people — that is, by the custodians of communal memory — rather
than by historians. When, eventually, the latter succeeded in appro-
priating these as material for their narratives, it signalled the overcom-
ing of tradition by nation and the end of what Goethe in his time and
Bakhtin in ours would have called an absolute past’ ( volkommen
vergangen ) — a past truly unassimilable to the present. And on that
catastrophic impact of Clio on Mnemosyne, the vernacular pasts went
to the ground as an endangered species or simply perished without
authorizing either the historian or the nationalist to speak for them.

A Construction of Humanism
in Colonial India

The Centre for Asian Studies has done me an honour by inviting
me to deliver the Wertheim Lecture. I realize in all humility
that the theme I have chosen for my address today at this
learned institution in the Netherlands connects a relatively new critical
initiative in South Asian Studies, a mere fledgling to a grand critical
tradition that has been your own for nearly five hundred years. For it
was the great Desiderius Erasmus who was the first of modern think-
ers critically to interrogate the concept of humanism, revise it, and
broaden its scope in order to make it adaptable to the social and intel-
lectual needs of the developing nationalisms of northern Europe. It is
my intention to try and demonstrate how the impact of that historic
intervention, which Europeanized what had been primarily a Florentine
phenomenon until then, was to enable humanism to surge in a second
wave as it overflowed its continental boundaries in the nineteenth
century and adapted itself once again to an emergent nationalism, but
one far removed from its metropolitan habitat.

It is of course not necessary for our purpose to put the stamp of a
scholastic convention on this genealogy by classifying it as an instance
of translatio imperii similar to the rise of humanism in Germany after
its decline in Italy. Yet it is not to be denied that the topos of this trans-
lation was imperial indeed in a very literal sense — a topos of cultural

480 The Small Voice of History

contest between the colonizer and the colonized which has been so
comprehensively explored in the works of Professor W.F. Wertheim. It
is as a tribute to that monumental and humane scholarship that I shall
present for your consideration a brief account of Western humanism s
outward voyage and the sea change which fashioned it into a humanism
of the colonized in an Asian cultural environment.

The word for culture in my language Bangla is samskriti . However,
any suggestion this might carry of some hoary antiquity within our
tradition must be dismissed as altogether spurious. For that name with
all its resonance has little to do with Samskrta or Sanskrit, the ancient
South Asian language, and designates a notion of less than two hund-
red years standing in Indian thought. Which goes to show that the
factuality of culture as a determinate set of beliefs and practices may
be as old as the life of any people in any land whatsoever, and yet a lan-
guage bides its own time to give those determinations the concept that
is adequate to them.

For Bangla that time of conceptualization was somewhere around
the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It was only then that the
displacements caused by colonial rule induced the language finally to
match the English word culture by a word of its own. That word was
anushilon . Derived from the Sanskrit anusilana — it had its sense al-
ready modified to an extent as it entered the vernacular lexicon. The
connotation it had of a disciplinary and repetitive exercise in classical
Sanskrit was now replaced by that of a new generic name and used as
such for the first time in a series of essays on religion published by
the well-known writer Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay in his journal
Bangadarsan in 1 884-5. 1

To try and match anushilon to culture was avowedly an act of trans-
lation for Bankimchandra. But as with all translation this too was
to prove a mismatch. For an expression can hardly transfer from one
language to another without some slippage occurring on the way and
indeed without fabricating a tissue of deterrences. Yet it is precisely in
the light of such difference that a language comes to know itself for
what it is. Nothing could serve better for a universal encyclopaedia of

1 These essays were to be gathered subsequently in Bankimchandra Chatto-
padhyay s monograph Dharmatattva (1888), a dissertation on religion.

A Construction of Humanism in Colonial India 48 1

differences, hence for an ultimate book of self-knowledge, than a com-
pilation of all possible translations. But leaving such a project to the
genius of some Borgesian phantasy, let us concentrate for a moment
on the small aperture opened up by the mis-understanding of culture
as anushilon within our own historical experience.

According to Bankimchandra, there was no Indian language which,
at the time of his writing in 1884, had its own word for culture, and
yet culture, he believed, was not foreign to India at all. On the contrary,
it was, he said, ‘the very essence of the Hindu religion.2 The canonic
structure of chaturasrama (an idealized division of life into four pha-
ses), texts like the Bhagavadgita , rituals like those prescribed by the
Tan trie and Yogic systems, and cults like husband-worship by married
women, the ascetic ideal of the widows brahmacharya , the discipline
of the vratas — all these, he said, had culture as their underlying con-
cept.3 However, his insistence on the concepts’ indigenous charac-
ter did not prevent him from acknowledging the key element that
was common to the English phrase and its translation — namely, the
notion of cultivation. What agriculture was to vegetation, anushilon,
that is, culture, was to mankind.4 This meant the cultivation of innate
human faculties, harmonization of their respective moments, and
generally their development. It was this that constituted the true reli-
gion of man and was conducive to his oprimal happiness. Anushilon
was indeed the very essence of humanism.5

Bankimchandra knew that his theory might be suspected of being
rather derivative, for a number of his ideas were close enough to those
of some Western thinkers to give the impression of a family resemblance.
He acknowledged parallelisms on particular points of approach and
exposition, but rejected the suggestion of any fundamental affinity
whatsoever. Bending the other way, he emphasized his opposition to
the nineteenth-century European doctrines of culture on the ground
of an irreducible theism on his own part. He was not sure whether

2 Bankim-Rachanabali> vol. 2, hereafter BR2 (Calcutta: Sahitya Samsad,
Bengali Year 1371), p.585.

3 BR2 , p. 585.

4 Ibid, p. 591.

5 Ibid., p. 408.

482

The Small Voice of History

chose Western doctrines were so immature because they were atheistic,
or so atheistic because they were immature. In any case, the Hindus,
he said, were firm believers and as such, had their theory of culture
anchored in their faith in God.6

Note the pronominal slide: his anushilon theory had by now as-
similated all of Hindu theism to itself — a presumption of some
considerable importance for his doctrine. Its implications are far too
numerous for me to take up for discussion here. I shall therefore try and
draw your attention to only one of them which seems to me particularly
relevant for our understanding of the destiny ofWestern humanism in
a colonial condition.

Bankimchandra spoke of faith in God as the ground of his dif-
ference. What however was clearly at issue was not God but man. In
this respect his theism had no obvious reason to come between any
Western theory of culture and one that was entirely his own, indeed
the argument carries on in the catechism — the form in which it is
presented on a model borrowed presumably from Comte7 — without
taking any notice of God in its initial stages. Even when the shishya
(disciple) queries the guru on his idea of culture as the religion of
man, the latters response does not rely on faith at all. ‘Religion , he
says, mocking the certainties of translation once again, ‘is a Western
word [pashchatya shabda ]. It has been interpreted in many different
ways by the Western scholars not one of whom agrees with another.’8
Is there nothing then on which all religions may be said to agree?
There is, says the guru, but that universal element should be called
dharma rather than religion in order to avoid confusion. ‘What is
that element?’ asks a by now thoroughly confused shishya, and the
instructor proceeds to explain it as ‘the dharma of all human beings
irrespective of their denomination as Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, or

6 Ibid., p. 585.

7 There is a good deal of evidence to show that Bankimchandra was thor-
oughly acquainted with Auguste Comtes works, including The Catechism of
Positive Religion , from which he cited a passage to serve for an epigraph in his
novel Debi Chaudhurani . There are a number of direct references to Comte in
his discursive writings as well, including Dhannatattva. For some information
on this point, see Jogesh Chandra Bagals introduction to BR2.

8 BR2, p. 589.

A Construction of Humanism in Colonial India 483

Musalman.’9 But the disciple is not ready to accept this obvious tauto-
logy for an answer. As he presses on with his questioning, a quick ex-
change follows. Thus,

Shishya :

How is one to find one’s way to that [universal
element]?

Guru :

Simply by asking what man’s dharma is.

Shishya:

That’s precisely what I am asking.

Guru :

There’s an easy answer to that. What do you think is a
magnet’s dharma?

Shishya:

Attracting iron.

Guru:

And fire’s dharma?

Shishya:

Burning.

Guru:

And water’s dharma?

Shishya:

Moisturizing.

Guru:

And the tree’s dharma?

Shishya:

Producing fruits and flowers.

Guru:

What then is mans dharma?

Shishya:

How can I say that in just one word?

Guru:

Well, why not call it manushyatva [literally: human-
ness; i.e. being human]?10

Quite clearly, God doesn’t come into the argument yet. For dharma
is identified here almost as a natural property of man in his species-
being, and testifies to a scientific orientation that does nothing to
distinguish this theory from its opposite numbers in the West, espe-
cially from Auguste Comte’s blatantly atheistic ‘Religion of Humanity’.

The exclusion of God was to be highlighted once again in the next
lesson when the guru set out to elaborate the notion of manushyatva
in terms of the postulates we have already noticed. According to these,
human faculties were of two kinds — physical (. saririk ) and mental
{manasik) — of which the latter could themselves be divided further
into three classes — intellectual {jnanarjani ), practical (, karyakarini ),
and aesthetic (< chittaranjini ) . It was the function of culture to help these
faculties to develop and mature to a state of mutual harmony. Man
could be said fully to realize his humanity only when that process of

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid., pp. 589-90.

484

The Small Voice of History

development (sphuran), maturity ( bikas ), and harmony (samanjasya)
had advanced well enough.1 1 Insofar as those faculties were innate to
human nature, they were what constituted mans dharma, and since
dharma was cultivated to its full potential by anushilon, it was proper,
wrote Bankimchandra, that the latter should be regarded as the very
substance of religion’.12

There is nothing so far in this theory to distinguish it from some of
the better-known eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European
doctrines. It is not only that culture has been assimilated to humanism
here in a manner characteristic of philosophical anthropology of that
period, and that the categories used are lifted directly from the writings
of Kant, Spencer, Comte, and John Stuart Mill. More importantly and
in a sense fundamental to the position from which Bankimchandra
speaks of culture, he shares with these post-Enlightenment think-
ers a belief that is central to humanism — a belief in the perfectibility
of man.

The perfectibility of man was an idea as old as Plato.13 But the
eighteenth century had made it its own by adopting it as a function of
reason. And since the latter was what set man apart from all other ani-
mals, ‘the humanity in his person, [i.e. in man considered] as an intel-
ligence’, wrote Kant, ‘is the only [thing] in the world, that admits of
the ideal of perfection' 1,4 The ideal was thought to be perfectly in
agreement with the spirit of the age as well. For the three hundred years
which separated the adventures of Columbus from those of Napoleon
had been so rich in globally expansive, intellectually uplifting, politically
formative and socially regenerative experience for Europe that ‘a real
capacity for change, and ... for progress towards a better and more
perfect condition seemed to be a defining characteristic of man and

11 Ibid., p. 595.

12 Ibid., p. 591 . Bankimchandra cites Comte’s words translated into English
without naming his source thus: ‘The Substance of Religion is Culture*.

13 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (London: Macmillan, 1990),
p. 486.

14 Ibid., Critique of Judgment (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), p. 8 1 . Emphasis
as in the original. Intelligence, as the translator s note in this edition points out,
must be understood ‘as a free rational and (noumenal) being, rather than as a
being of sense.’

485

A Construction of Humanism in Colonial India

the very measure of his difference from merely natural objects with
their propensity for a cyclical and stable condition of existence.15

But even as this notion established itself as the essence of human
potentiality and the driving force of progress, its usefulness for any ex-
planation of the dynamics of change came increasingly to be doubted
in the wake of the great transformations of post- revolutionary Europe.
Hegel, for instance, thought that the idea of perfectibility made change
far too general and indefinite a phenomenon ‘with no criterion whereby
change [could] be measured ... no principle which [could] help us
to exclude irrelevant factors and no goal or definite end is in sight.’
Indeed, ‘to suggest that it is possible and even necessary for [man] to
become increasingly perfect’ was, in his opinion, to make the idea of
progress itself rather unsatisfactory.16 He was for progress, but insisted
that ‘to discuss progress in definite terms ... we must know the goal
which is supposed to be ultimately attained.’ 17 His project, in other
words, was to save progress from straying into a bad infinity and bring
it back to history with perfectibility replaced by telos.

Bankimchandra too was committed to the notion of progress which,
he claimed, was no less in agreement with science than with divine
will.18 But unlike Hegel he did not regard progress as incompatible
with perfectibility. It was this rather than his theism that justified
the distinction he claimed for his own views. For the uses he made of
anushilon to marry perfectibility to history would have been unthinkable
for any of the contemporary European doctrines of culture. The human-
ism of those doctrines relied precisely on that element of indefiniteness
which made perfectibility unacceptable to Hegel. But indefiniteness
was no problem for Bankimchandra. He solved it by relocating
perfectibility in another time and assigning another agency to it. The
consequence of this double revision was to question the hegemony of
a universalist anthropology and ground the latter in the specificity of
a colonial experience.

15 G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 124-5.

16 Ibid., p. 125.

17 IbiJ., p. 126.

18 BR2, p. 434.

486 The Small Voice of History

To turn first to the temporal aspect. Perfectibility was, for Hegel, the
function of a constant progress which must always remain distant
from its goal/19 It was the irreducibility of that distance which, he
feared, would make it impossible for progress to secure itself in any
determinate past or present, both of which would be consumed neces-
sarily by an ever-receding future. Thanks to perfectibility, change
would thus be kept waiting at the door of history without ever being
asked to come in.

Bankimchandra got over this difficulty by rescuing the concept
from tutelage to an inescapable future and giving it a past. Perfectibility,
he argued, had already been attained by mankind in the lives of some
of its most illustrious representatives, and proceeded to name them.
The names were all taken from what he called dharmetihas , translating
avowedly again from the English phrase ‘religious history’, of which
the generic models were, according to him, the New Testament and the
authentic portions of the Hindu Puranas.20 The Perfect, reclaimed
from the abyss of time, were now lodged securely in a past perfect with
religion as witness to their great cultural achievements. The process
we have already noticed of culture’s assimilation to dharma was thus
brought to completion with the latter assimilated in its turn to history.
The pursuit of perfection was no longer to be referred to an indefinite
furure; it was already on record.

The personalities named in Bankimchandras roll of perfection are
described by him as Adarsa Purush — ‘Ideal Men. Men, because there
was nothing in the authors Indian background or his Western-style
education yet to enable him to think of humanity as other than male
by gender. Adarsa. in Bangla, as in the Sanskrit from which it is bor-
rowed, means a pattern from which a copy is made or a model that
is imitated. So, according to Bankimchandra, these men, as Adarsa
Purush, are an ideal for others to emulate, because it is in them that
perfection is embodied in its fulness.

To adopt the idea of perfectibility as an ideal, says Kant in the first
Critique ,21 is to step out of the realm of pure reason into that of ethics,

19 Hegel, Lectures , p. 149.

20 BR2, p. 593.

21 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 486-7.

A Construction of Humanism in Colonial India 487

for ideals, as moral concepts, ‘have practical power (as regulative prin-
ciples) and form the basis of the possible perfection of certain actions . ’
The idea provides the rule , while the ideal serves, according to him, ‘as
the archetype for the complete determination of the copy/ But how
complete? He responds, first, by pointing to the ideals negative
function insofar as it enables us ‘to estimate and to measure the degree
and defects of the incomplete/ That should have taken care of Hegel’s
worry about the lack of standard and measure in the notion of per-
fectibility. Why it didn’t is made clear by the cautionary advice that
follows. It is in ‘the nature of the ideal of reason, argues Kant, that it
‘must always rest on determinate concepts and serve as a rule and
archetype, alike in our actions and in our critical judgments/ However,
‘the conditions that are required for such determinations are not ... to
be found in experience, and the concept itself is therefore transcendent/
Hence, it will be ‘impracticable’, he says, ‘to attempt to realize the ideal
in an example, that is, in the [field of] experience, as, for instance, to
depict the [character of the perfectly] wise man in a romance . . / To
do so will indeed be absurd, because the ‘illusion’, that is, vraisemblancey
produced by such a creative exercise will not be strong enough to over-
come ‘the natural limitations, which are constantly doing violence to
the completeness of the idea.’

Where does that leave the idea of perfectibility then? Suspended, I
guess, somewhere between the ether of pure reason and the earth of
practical reason. But the important thing to notice is that it is no longer
indefinite in quite the same sense as we have discussed so far. It has
acquired a degree of determination as practical power and standard of
human action, although man as the agent of such practice and acti-
vity still stands outside experience. The figure, abstracted thus from
experience, is of course none other than the Enlightenment s universal
man of reason. Like the wise man of the Stoics cited by Kant as ‘an
ideal, that is, a man existing in thought alone but in complete confor-
mity with the idea of wisdom’,22 the universal man too is as if existing
in thought alone but in complete conformity with the idea of univers-
ality. He is, in short, that archetype whom David Hume had in mind
when he spoke for all of the eighteenth century by describing mankind

22 Ibid., p. 486.

488 The Small Voice of History

as ‘so much the same in all times and places that history informs us of
nothing new or strange in particular/ He, like his contemporaries, saw
human action as marked by ‘a great uniformity ... in all nations and
ages, and human nature as everywhere and always ‘the same in its
principles and operations’.23

This was an image of man constructed by the European bourgeoisie
in an age of spectacular expansion and ascendancy when, as Marx has
observed,24 its particular interests generated the illusion of being
universal interests, and the thrust of capital and territorial power
seemed unlikely to be contained ever again by the limits of time and
place. Under those circumstances the self-image of a particular class
belonging to one continent and period was easily inflated by the domi-
nant ideology into a universal image of mankind; the ideal envisaged
in that image was therefore best left to rhought alone, transcendent and
unsullied by experience, as Kant advised.

There was no way that the cultural construction of perfectibility in
Bankimchandras essay on religion could justify itself without chal-
lenging the universalist pretensions of such a Eurocentric humanism.
Indeed, it could hardly do so without claiming to speak for an alter-
native humanism that an Asian people, subjected to colonial rule,
could call its own. It was appropriate therefore that transcendence
should be replaced by experience and the universal by the particular in
the discourse of that other humanism.

There are four devices used in this critique ofWestcrn anthropology
to delimit the universal by the particular and plant the ideal in
experience. The first of these undermines the ideals transcendental
status by a positive act of nomination. Nothing particularizes more
than personal names, and by choosing a number of named individuals
for his list Bankimchandra dissolves the abstraction of perfectibility in
effect. It is no longer a hermetically sealed capsule of pure thinking, but
has been contaminated by experience and actualized in particular lives.
Kants injunction against any attempt to realize the ideal in an

23 David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning
the Principles of Morals, 3rd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 83.

24 The German Ideology in K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works (London:
Lawrence and Wishart, 1976), vol. 5, p. 180

A Construction of Humanism in Colonial India 489

example’ has been clearly ignored in this case and with it the transcen-
dentality for which it was meant to serve as a condition.

Secondly, the criterion used by Bankimchandra in his choice of the
Perfect constitutes yet another device to delimit the universal. It sub-
jects the ideal to particularization by attributing a determinate corporeal-
ity to the Adarsa Purush. These ideal men are, according to him,
iswarer anukari manushya> that is, ‘humans made in imitation of God’.
They are 'seen to excel in virtue [gunadhikya dekhiya ] and regarded
therefore as partially divine beings [iswaramsa] or even as human
incarnations of God [ manab dehadhari iswar ] . ’25 There seems to be an
insistence here in the text that its emphasis on visibility must not be
overlooked: the excellence of virtue is seen as a partial manifestation
of divinity in some of the Perfect and so is the human body assumed
by God in the others. This agrees fully with the import of adarsa. The
radical darsa speaks through that noun-phrase adarsha of the help
that seeing renders to copying and imitating.26 Which is why the
visibility of divine attributes (aisi gun ) in their persons makes it pos-
sible for others to emulate them as ideal men. Clearly there is more to
perfection than some disembodied and abstract concept of morality.
It is actualized and embodied in human beings. It follows therefore
that the ideal itself will no longer remain trapped in thought alone.
Incorporated in experience, it will henceforth realize itself in its parti-
cular moments as defined by the co-ordinates of time and space — that
is, by history.

History militates in this argument in a number of different ways the
most important ofwhich is the historicization of Krishna. He is ranked
amongst the highest of the Adarsa Purush.27 With all his physical and
mental faculties developed to their full extent he was a paradigm of
human perfection. Bankimchandra was of course aware that there was
something implausible about this attempt to cast one of the principal

25 BR2y p. 593. Emphasis added.

26 The specular element is pronounced enough to make adarsa mean a
mirror in classical Sanskrit. See, for instance, Kalidasas use of the word as in
adarie hiranmaye (Raghuvamsam: 17: 26) or atmanamalokya cha sobhamana -
madarsuuimbe stimitayatakshi ( Kumdrasambhavam : 7: 22).

27 BR2, pp. 581-3.

490

The Small Voice of History

gods of the Hindu pantheon in the image of man. But he sought to
dispel any doubts on this score by asking the reader to concentrate ex-
clusively on the ethical aspect of his interpretation. It mattered little,
according to him, whether the plenitude of virtue that made a super-
man (atimanush) of Krishna was a function of his divinity or the very
perfection of humanity in him was what made him divine. Whatever
the explanatory value of rhis evasive remark, tucked away in the very
last paragraph of his treatise Krishnacharitra , it did nothing to dimi-
nish the pronounced historicism of that work dominated by Krishna
as an entirely historical personality from beginning to end.28

The most remarkable thing about this exercise was its method. It
pushed theology, which had been in charge of Krishna scholarship
in eastern India for at least three hundred years until then, firmly aside
to make room for the science of history. Bankimchandra was well
acquainted with that science, as many of his other writings testify. But
nowhere else was his mastery in this regard displayed on such a scale
and with such sophistication. He had obviously taught himself all that
the West had to teach about the collection, examination, and use of
evidence, and developed a positivist historiography distinguished no
less by its erudition than by its analytic rigour. Archaeology, ethnology,
chronology, and philology were all deployed in this project — but all as
instruments of an elaborate hermeneutic operation. The latter had the
entire range of shastric literature as its object and interrogated it
relentlessly in an attempt to situate Krishna at the very core of the
Mahabharata rather than in its extrapolated parts, recover whatever
was human and plausible about his biography in the Puranas with-
out reliance on the purely mythic and the supernatural, and use all
that material, but above all the Bhagavadgita, to construct an ethical
personality to match his standing as the most cultured and perfect of
human beings.

These texts, which had for centuries provided tradition with imme-
diate access to the sacred and the divine, appeared suddenly to have
lost their transparency. Mobilized to serve as sources of infoimation
on man and his world, they had darkened in a strange muddle of the
authentic and the spurious, the contemporaneous and the anachronic,
the rational and the miraculous. The credulity of theology had

28 Ibid., p. 583.

A Construction of Humanism in Colonial India 49 1

therefore to make way for history. Henceforth it would be up to the
latter to mine the density of these texts, use some typically Western
means of verifiability to separate the false from the true, and constitute
the latter as evidence. In Bankimchandras Krishnacharitra it was the
function of such evidence to construct Krishna’s humanity — his
politics, his sociability, even his mortality — his historicity in short.

This historicist device used to save perfectibility from dissolving in
universalism had a corollary which merits some consideration on
its own. It refers us again to the panel of the illustrious. Of the twelve
named there all but three were Hindus.29 The non Hindus were none
other than the leaders of the three great world religions — Buddhism,
Christianity, and Islam. Yet in the final ranking Buddha, Christ, and
Muhammad were placed after Krishna, whose personality was supposed
to have been the consummation of all that was positive in the others.

However, the superiority claimed by this judgement extended
far beyond Krishna to a claim made for Hinduism as a whole and
for Indian culture which was indistinguishable from the latter in
Bankimchandras thinking. What was indexed by the politics of such
comparison was clearly the concern of a nascent and still rather weak
nationalism to compensate itself for its actual want of power by the
sense of a great cultural achievement in the past. The historicization of
Krishna thus enabled the colonized in South Asia to adopt Western
humanism in the only form and measure permitted by history — that
is, as a nationalism.

This was how the concept of culture made its debut in nineteenth-
century India as a moment of the ruling colonial culture. However, the
only way it could be adapted to Indian thinking was in response to the
question: ‘What is it to be human?’ The same question had been asked
and answered in universalist terms by the European thinkers of the
Enlightenment. But in India under British rule it evoked yet another
and more vexatious question: ‘What is it to be human as a colonial
subject?’ The answer, based on our reading of Bankimchandras works,
was one that challenged the universalist pretensions of Western
humanism by constituting the colonized as a human subject particular-
ized and historicized within the South Asian experience. Humanism,
the spiritual foil to capital, met in the colonial condition a historical

29 Ibid., p. 594.

492 The Small Voice of History

threshold which, like the latter, it would never be able to cross. Sharply
differentiated from the humanism of the metropolitan powers in the
age of expansion, there would henceforth be a humanism fdr the colo-
nized as well. Designated as a nationalism of sorts and armed with
quasi-universalist pretensions of its own, it would claim to speak for
all Indians lumped together by the sameness David Hume had attri-
buted to all mankind.

PART IV

The Promise of Nationhood

The Mahatma and the Mob

This is a superb collection of essays held together by a somewhat
inaccurate title. 1 For if the volume may be said to have a mes-
sage, it is precisely that in April 1919 Gandhi s call for a coun-
trywide satyagraha drew forth a rather un-Gandhian response.

What we have here is a magnificent portrait of King Mob stalking
the cities of northern and western India that spring. The Rowlatt Act
was merely a peg on which it was found convenient to hang a multitude
of local grievances, arising from hunger and high prices rather than
from any clearly defined political aspiration. It is this local focus that
brings to these essays a degree of lustre and lucidity which one so rarely
associates with academic exercises in Indian history. No attempt has
been made here to repeat the tiresome depiction of a global phenomenon
in large, thick strokes which so often result in unhistorical abstractions
of all kinds. On the contrary, an apparently all-India event has been
broken up into a series of regional frames offering us a view that is re-
freshing as well as concrete. For this Professor Kumar and his team of
contributors deserve much gratitude.

Two of these essays, by A.L. Basham and D.A. Low, fell somewhat
outside the scope of this volume and need not be discussed here, al-
though the reader can ill afford to miss Basham s brilliant study of the

1 Ravinder Kumar, ed., Essays on Gandhian Politics: The Rowlatt Satyagraha
of 1919 { Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).

496

The Small Voice of History

indigenous roots of Gandhian thought and Lows of the official mind
on the eve of the first Non-Cooperation Movement.

Of the seven other essays in this volume, two are of a class by them-
selves insofar as they both relate to such aspects of the Rowlatt Satya-
graha as are not specific to any particular region. P.H.M. van den
Dungen writes about attitudes, and Hugh Owen about organization.
The former argues convincingly against ‘the view that Gandhi’s loyalty
suddenly gave way somewhere between 1918 and 1920.* He then
proceeds to try and argue that Gandhi’s loyalty gave way gradually
between 1905 and 1909. 1 find it hard to accept this counter-thesis.
For, as the author himself demonstrates on the basis of a statement
dating from 1910, Gandhi’s idea of ‘loyalty* had nothing to do with
the conventional meaning of this word. ‘My notion of loyalty*, said
Gandhi, ‘does not involve acceptance of current rule or government,
irrespective of its righteousness or otherwise. Such notion is based
upon the belief — not in its present justice or morality but — in a future
acceptance by Government of that standard of morality in practice
which it at present vaguely and hypocritically believes in, in theory.’ I
find this pretty daunting, and to characterize a person as a loyalist or
a rebel in terms of such a concept does not impress me as a meaningful
exercise. No wonder that the author spends a good deal of his time
trying — unsuccessfully, I think — to sort out the inconsistencies be-
tween what may be called Gandhi s spiritual disloyalty* and his many
overt acts of practical loyalty to the Raj . Kumar seems to accept van den
Dungens idea that Gandhi had already ceased to be loyal by 1909, and
that his break with the Raj ‘did not come about in 1909 . . . because
conditions were then not ripe for it.* So what then, in these terms, is
Gandhi between 1909 and 1919? A non-loyalist non-rebel? Could it
be that we land ourselves in such absurdities simply by trying to provide
elaborate answers to such non-questions as ‘Gandhi in 1919: Loyalist
or Rebel?'

Hugh Owen writes about ‘Organizing for the Rowlatt Satyagraha
of 1 91 9’ and comes out with the unsurprising, though highly signifi-
cant, conclusion that Gandhi s ‘organization for the campaign was
dearly minimal, and in places inadequate.* He examines by turn the
contribution of the Home Rule leagues, the Satyagraha Sabha, the

The Mahatma and the Mob

497

local Gandhian leaders, and Gandhi himself ro the initiation and deve-
lopment of the movement, and finds them all wanting. For, in the last
analysis, the mob takes over from the Mahatma and organization gives
way to spontaneity. Having produced twenty-seven pages of solid
evidence in favour of such a conclusion the author, curiously enough,
changes course in the very last lap of his essay and ascribes the organiz-
ational failure not to what clearly was Gandhi s failure to organize but
to a mystique of his anarchism. Gandhi, he suggests, understood orga-
nization well enough, but it was his anarchist temperament and op-
position to elaborate organizational structures which stopped him
from applying his skills in this respect to the Rowlatt Satyagraha. The
suggestion unmistakably is that Gandhi chose not to organize out of
philosophical considerations. The philosophy itself is sought to be
illustrated by an extract from Satyagraha in South Africa and the
mystique made poignant by a quotation from his Autobiography: ‘But
who knows how it all came about?' Kumar, too, indicates his approval
of Owens interpretation when he writes of Gandhi s ‘commitment
to anarchist principles’ and refers to ‘the astonishing fact that in some
of the areas where the Rowlatt Satyagraha caused the greatest stir the
Home Rule leagues and satyagraha sabhas were to all intents and pur-
poses non-existent!’

I frankly confess to being baffled by all this. It seems to me that
Gandhis opposition to the act of governing is being mistaken here for
an opposition to organizing. The quotation from Satyagraha in South
Africa illustrates Gandhi s philosophy and not his practice, and the
Lord knows that the old man was quite capable of thinking (and talk-
ing) in one way and acting in another. In no dharma-yuddha fought
until 1919 did he leave it to ‘God Himself’ to plan his campaigns or
conduct his batdes. There is absolutely no evidence to support the
belief that in South Africa, Champaran, Ahmedabad, or Kheda he had
been anything but meticulous about the minutest organizational
detail for the campaign concerned. We learn enough from Owens own
article as well as from some of the other contributions in this volume
to realize why Gandhi did not succeed in organizing the Rowlatt
Satyagraha as well as he did his previous campaigns. He fell ill. The bill
was being rushed. Things started moving too fast for him. The Home

498

The Small Voice of History

Rule leagues were there but they were not a comprehensive all-India
network nor, as the offspring of movements originally inspired by
Besan t and Tilak, had they yet come to grasp fully the concept of satya-
graha and its organizational implications. So far as the Congress was
concerned, Gandhi had less than a toehold in it yet. His own Satya-
graha Sabha was a good idea. But it had had far too little time to strike
roots throughout the land as an effective apparatus of control over vast,
angry masses of the population. Gandhi’s own elite corps of disciples
was still very small and split right down the middle between two sec-
tions: there were those who had come with him from South Africa
steeled in satyagraha bur with little grassroot connections with Indian
politics, and there were the others who had only recently been initiated
to satyagraha through the campaigns in eastern and western India
and were good local leaders with excellent all-India potential that had
yet to mature. What the latter shared with their master was, above all,
a lack of organizational experience on a subcontinental scale. For
Gandhi had, by 1919, acquired an instinct for the right slogan with
which to rally a given mass of people, but not quite the control that
would help to deploy them as a disciplined force throughout the
country. Consequently, as Owen puts it, ‘once crowds had been roused
an element of spontaneity entered the scene/ Under the circumstan-
ces it was only natural that the explosiveness of the crowd, for which
‘Rowlatt Satyagraha is merely a euphemism, should have been inverse-
ly related to organization in such forms as Home Rule leagues or
satyagraha sabhas. Anything other than this would have been truly
astonishing.

It would thus appear as if too much is being read in that one sen-
tence: ‘Who knows how it all came about?’ Unlike Owen and Kumar
for whom this indicates Gandhi’s ‘commitment to anarchist principles’,
Ferrell reads this as a confession of his ‘confusion and chagrin at the
way the satyagraha had misfired and got out of control, for ‘Gandhi
had not foreseen that the people would join in such numbers in his
protest against the Rowlatt Act.’ It is ‘people in such numbers’ who
provide Ferrell with the theme for a most interesting exercise. He
admits to deriving his inspiration from Rude, although he finds the
Indian data to be far less satisfactory for a study of the behaviour of

The Mahatma and the Mob

499

crowds than the corresponding material on the French Revolution.
Even this latter turns out to be far less reliable than one had thought
until some time ago, and a number of recent studies of the French
Revolution, Richard Cobbs for instance, have shown how suspect in-
telligence reports could be. In view of this I greatly appreciate the
honesty of Gillion’s remark that our information is not substantial
enough to support a proper analysis of the crowd, although one would
be justified in complaining that the latter in his article, ‘Gujarat in
191 9% tends to throw up his hands far too soon without trying to
process to the best advantage the not-inconsiderable amount of data
available in the Disorders Inquiry Committee Report.

Ferrells essay is an excellent study of Delhi — Old Delhi, that is, the
Delhi of the Jama Masjid, Chandni Chowk, Sadar Bazar, and Sabzi
Mandi — that blew up in the face of the relatively new imperial ad-
ministration during the first half of April 1919. 1 am not sure if Ferrell
is not indeed the very first historian — with the exception of Pcrcival
Spear two generations ago — to have made such good use of the records
of the Delhi Administration in order to supplement the evidence of the
Disorders Inquiry Committee. However, he seems to me to be less than
adequately illuminating about the local elite he calls the primary
leaders’, if only because he never thinks it necessary to explain why and
how these are different from those he calls the secondary leaders’. Yet
the picture that he draws of a three-tiered urban population caught up
in the drama of these fourteen days is very vivid indeed. What one may
find confusing, if not altogether irritating at times, is the pedantic dis-
tinction made between ‘audience’, crowd’, and ‘mob’, with the words
put within quotation marks on every occasion they are used so that
nothing is missed of their significance. The distinctions, I suggest, are
altogether unnecessary. The reader may test this out for himself by the
following procedure. Let him make an inventory, as I have done, of all
sentences featuring these terms in Ferrell’s essay, read crowd’ in all
cases, add adjectives like ‘attentive’, ‘restive’, violent’, and so on (or ap-
propriate adjectival clauses) to describe the relevant mood, and he will
find out that the authors distinctions are at best arbitrary and at the
worst obfuscating. Thus, for instance, the following comparison in
Table 1.

500

The Small Voice of History
Table 1

HIS MINE

The leaders fanned the flames of
this feeling so successfully that a
section of the crowd’ which was
by now transformed into a ‘mob’,
threw brick-bats at the troops
and officials, (p. 190)

Chaos and confusion reigned
supreme as the terrified ‘mob’
fled in every direction, (pp. 190-2)

The news of the firing transformed
this ‘crowd’, too, into a ‘mob’ and
once again brick-bats flew. (p. 1 92)

Shradhanand and the other leaders
lectured on swadeshi and satyagraha
to an audience’ of 15,000 to 20,000
at King Edward Park at noon.

(p. 223)

The leaders fanned the flames of
this feeling so successfully that a
section of the crowd turned
violent and threw brick-bats
at the troops and
officials.

Chaos and confusion reigned
supreme as the terrified crowd fled
in every direction.

The news of the firing made this
crowd violent, too, and once again
brick-bats flew.

Shradhanand and the other
leaders lectured on swadeshi and
satyagraha to a crowd of 15,000 to
20,000 at King Edward Park at
noon.

In fact the words are in most cases interchangeable in the way Ferrell
uses them. Historians like Edward Thompson working on the eight-
eenth-century food riots in England have sometimes found the word
‘mob* somewhat elitist and disparaging as a description of an angry
assembly of insurgents. But if one is really as free of such considerations
as Ferrell, judging by his uninhibited use of rhc term ‘lower classes’,
seems to be, one should have no difficulty in writing mob’ for crowd’
or vice versa.

How flimsy the distinction is between crowd’ and ‘mob’, as Ferrell
makes it out to be, can be clearly seen from an application of his own
criteria to the assembly described on p. 228. The criteria as laid down
in the note on pp. 189-90 are as follows in Tabic 2.

It is clear that the two tei ms are not comparable with respect to
(e) because we have no information for one of them. For the rest, they

The Mahatma and the Mob

501

Table 2

CROWD MOB

(a)

a collection of people

‘a collection of people’

‘has a focus of interest’

(*)

‘has a focus of interest’

(c)

usually has little

‘coheres’

cohesion’

id)

‘has no proclivity to

usually proceeds to activities

violence’

of a violent nature’

‘will follow a spontaneous

leadership

are similar in terms of {a) and ( b ), but dissimilar — perhaps contradict-
ory— in terms of (c) and ( d ). Now go to p. 228 and you will see that
the assembly of 1 5,000 described there had a great deal of cohesion
and showed much 'proclivity to violence: they were Jats and had gath-
ered in front of the Town Hall in an angry and aggressive mood; they
were carrying lathis and looked as if they would be prepared to
use them, invade the Town Hall and liberate the leaders by force, if
necessary. They had thus all the characteristics of a mob’ by Ferrells
definition, but in fact he describes them as a crowd’!

If I have thought /fit to write at such length about a certain termino-
logical obsession in an otherwise excellent article, it is only because I
want to draw the attention of fellow historians to what may be best
described as a problem of growth. Since the end of the Second World
War there has been a healthy swing, particularly among the younger
scholars, from the study of Indian political history in purely institutio-
nal terms to its study in sociological terms. Starting off in the USA this
new wave hit Australasia by the 1 960s, and thanks particularly to a
good deal of path-breaking research at the Australian National Univer-
sity at the time we have already before us a number of first-rate mono-
graphs on Indian history enriched with much sociological insight.
Most contributions of this genre impress one as rigorous, clear-eyed,
analytic works. Yet some of the finest writings of this class have been
known to have been flawed by an enthusiasm for pseudo-scientific
jargon. And once the jargon gets going, even the best of historians

502

The Small Voice of History

might from time to time be tempted to indulge in it. Professor Kumar s
introduction to this volume contains an instance of such a lapse. Ins-
pired by Broomfield, he uses the term ‘chota bhadralok’ to describe a
section of Bengali society. Now, as an authentic Bengali I can assure
Professor Kumar that this term has little to do with either the Bengali
language or Bengali society. We do have such terms as choto ( chota )/
barot garib/barolok , chotolok/ bhadralok , but we do not have anything
called chota bhadralok. If petty in the term petty cultured folic (which
is Kumars translation of chota bhadralok’) is meant to stand for ‘less
affluent’, ‘impoverished’, etc., then one could perhaps simply say
‘garib bhadralok’ or ‘nimna madhyabitto’. In pointing this out it is
by no means my purpose here to air the objections that a Bengali
may have to the way Broomfield has extended the meaning of the
term bhadralok to include those who should properly be called bhadra
Musalman nor to its use, in another hand, as indicative of a class
rather than of a social category, but simply to illustrate how even the
best sociological exercises in Indian history are sometimes not altogether
free from an impressionistic use of what is meant to be a language of
analysis.

The three most outstanding contributions in this volume are those
by Baker, Masselos and Kumar. Baker’s article is about a non-event, for
the Rowlatt Satyagraha, contrary to the claims made on its behalf by
the official History of the Freedom Movement in Madhya Pradesh , hardly
got off the ground in the Central Provinces and Berar. Baker punctures
this myth and demonstrates how Gandhi failed to mobilize the sup-
port of the regional leaders in the Hindi as well as the Marathi districts.
The moral, clearly, is that the uneven development of the Indian na-
tionalist movement is a fact which no historian can afford to ignore.

As against Baker who is concerned to write about how and where
the Rowlatt Satyagraha did not happen, Masselos and Kumar are con-
cerned to show how and where it did with a vengeance. Masselos writes
about the disturbances in Bombay city, and Kumar about those in
Lahore. These are both masterly studies of urban upheavals, and like
the very best of historical statements can be read at several levels. For
a long time to come we shall have to turn to these articles again and
again for our understanding of the behaviour of Indian crowds, of local
level politics at the end of the First World War, and of the populist

The Mahatma and the Mob

503

placenta which both nourished and enmeshed an embryonic Gandhism
on the eve of the first Non-Cooperation Movement. Above all, they
represent in their workmanship that perfect marriage between the
disciplines of history and sociology which should serve as a model for
all practitioners in the field. There should be a great deal for all of us
to look forward to, if these two contributions are even remotely indi-
cative of the quality of the current Australian work on Indian history.

The Movement for
National Freedom in India

An academic historian has often an albatross slung around his
neck. It comes in the form of a seminar. It goes with the job.

. There is nothing one can do about it. There is no redemption
until retirement. It is therefore customary for us to suffer in silence and
make no effort at all to immortalize every weekly belch by publish-
ing it. Dr Mukherjee has yielded to temptation. The result is a mixed
bag of six studies on various aspects of the Indian freedom move-
ment.1 One of these — Zafar Imams essay on the impact of the Russian
Revolution — is excellent. Another — by Argov on Moderates and
Extremists — is substandard and could have been easily dispensed with.
A third one — J.H. Voigts ‘Nationalist Interpretations of Arthasastra
in Indian Historical Writing’ — combines erudition and analytic naivete
in a manner more characteristic of the proceedings of the Indian History
Congress than of an Oxford seminar. The rest are mediocre chips from
distinguished workshops.

Take, for instance, S. Copals article, ‘Lord Curzon and Indian
Nationalism, 1 898-1905'. This is easily the best piece ofwriting in the
volume. But on a theme like this one has a right to expect more than

Copyright © 1969 Ranajit Guha. First published in The Indian Economic
and Social History Review , 6, 4, December 1 969, pp. 439-46.

1 S.N. Mukherjee (ed.), The Movement for National Freedom in India, South
Asian Affairs, no. 2, St Antony s Papers , no. 18 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1966).

The Movement for National Freedom in India 505

a modicum of readable prose. The author describes how the national-
ist leaders had been suffering from high hopes for a square deal from
Curzon until in the summer of 1903 he caused offence all around by
deciding to partition Bengal. This part of the story is, of course, fairly
well known. One would have thought this worth retelling only if
the process of disillusionment was probed at some depth. But we are
offered no insight in this respect. Yet, this is unfair comment. For, we
know that Gopal can do better: during the interval between the
presentation of this paper at Dr Mukherjee s seminar and its appearance
in print he has come out with his authoritative study of British policy
in India, where one could find all the meat one wished for. What
purpose then is served by publishing this seven-page snippet which
makes us no wiser about the subject and is so thoroughly unrepre-
sentative of the authors command of it?

In ‘Nehru and Early Indian Socialism’ Dietmar Rothermund sets
out by asserting that Nehru’s connection with the Indian socialist
movement ‘cannot be described in institutional or ideological terms,
because Nehru’s political loyalties and doctrines were always highly
personal.* Yet, if there’s anything that emerges at all from this somewhat
pompously phrased essay, it is (a) that, institutionally \ Nehru was a
thoroughly integrated Congressman, and (b) that, ideologically , his so-
cialism was Vedantic. The first of these two propositions is a com-
monplace, the second plain silly. We all know that Nehru’s socialism
was, as Rothermund says, just Verbal radicalism’, and that he never did
anything to put into jeopardy his total identification with the Congress
mainstream. True, he reached out from time to time for the pale ro s6
of social-democracy, vintage 1926. but did so in such a manner as
not to upset anyone at all. The Congress elders simply pretended not
to notice. He would often lace his speeches with a pink rhetoric;
sometimes he would be reported seen in the company of dangerous
men in distant European capitals, or would go into a huddle with one
or two CSP acharyas of mildly lcftish sentiment, but young Hal was
all right — he was quite all right — and keeping himself fit for the suc-
cession. All this is part of a familiar scene, and the author s conclusion
that Nehru’s attitude to socialism was ambiguous is not shockingly
original. Pity. For the author would have enhanced our understanding
of this complex phenomenon at least in two respects. First, he could

506

The Small Voice of History

have offered us a concrete breakdown of the components of Nehru’s
socialist thought which, one suspects, was more bourgeois liberal than
Hindu Vedantic. Secondly, he could have undertaken to find out how
and precisely under what pressures at critical points of the nationalist
movement Nehru backed out from the socialist brink and joined his
party Establishment. If Ro therm und could shake off some of his
superciliousness, he could have found enough in orthodox Marxism* —
in Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte , for instance —
to realize that Nehrus ambivalence* had considerably less to do with
caprice than with reflexes characteristic of his class.

Dennis Daltons essay is an exercise in pure intellectual history.
Is the word ‘freedom’ used in quite the same sense in Indian and
Western political philosophies? He is quite right in pointing out the
absurdity of assuming an identity of meaning and of making Indian
political thinkers more beholden to Western thought than they real-
ly were. He is concerned also with the methodological problems of
distinguishing the two semantic universes in which the concept of
freedom operates as well as of finding out levels of correspondence be-
tween them. At a time when it is becoming increasingly fashionable to
seek in the history of Indian nationalism a metaphor for the behavi-
our of ants, it is perhaps healthy to hear a voice asserting, however
unselfconsciously, that ideas matter. What I am not so sure about is
whether a perch on the roof of the superstructure offers the best pos-
sible view of a political scrum. Metaphysics, as neat as Dalton makes
it, can hardly be a cure for Namieritis.

By far the best contribution here comes from Zafar Imam. The
evidence he has brought together from a wide range of contemporary
Indian and Russian sources is very impressive indeed and has only to
be supplemented by the rich documentation we have on this subject
in the Home- Political series at the National Archives of India. It is
quite clear from this account that the October Revolution was first
popularized in India by bureaucrats who saw in every nationalist
an agent of Bolshevism. Among the patriots there were those who
responded to this proletarian revolution with sympathy but without
any understanding of its character or perhaps because of it: for them
it was simply a triumph of the oppressed over the oppressors, a sort of
storming of an ‘Asian' bastille — the analogy of 1789 was in fact often

The Movement for National Freedom in India 507

invoked. So far as the working classes were concerned, the hardships
of a war economy and the brutalities of a black-and-tan regime were
enough to drive them towards more disciplined forms of association
and collective bargaining. Imam makes this point himself, but then
goes on to say that the liveliness of the Indian working class movement
in the period immediately following the demise of tsardom was
‘significant and not a mere coincidence’. Significant, of course, but
coincidental too, and his own evidence would strongly disprove any
suggestion of a direct causality. This model that the established labour
leaders like Joseph Baptista and N.M. Joshi had before them in their
expanding trade union activities was reformist rather than revolution-
ary. Even for young Dange, the glint of October already in his eyes,
Gandhism was still in 1 9 1 9 more convincing than Leninism. Altogether
this is a most admirable piece of research which would help immensely
to dispel the myth of a push-button impact of the Russian Revolution
on Indian politics.

The editors own contribution is in the form of an introductory
essay where he undertakes ‘to examine very briefly some of the ac-
cepted views of Indian nationalism’ and to ‘suggest a possible strategy
for research on the subject’ (p. 10).

The general point that he has to make on the first of these two
counts is unexceptionable. He argues that a great deal of what has been
written by the British about India has always been and still is based on
imperialist assumptions, and that this has led to a good deal of mis-
understanding about Indian nationalism, to an excessive, if not ex-
clusive, obsession with Britain’s role in India and to an underestimation
of what our own institutions and our own people contributed to the
dynamics of political and social change in our country.

Where this perfectly straightforward observation turns askew and,
if I may say so, rancorous, is when the School of Oriental and African
Studies (SOAS), University of London, and its director. Professor
C.H. Philips, are made out to be the sole agents of this imperialist
tradition in post-War Britain. What about Oxford and Cambridge?
And, if one must name the key individuals concerned, what about
C.C. Davies and Percival Spear, who for many years presided over
graduate studies in Indian history at these older universities? And since
imperialism is to be identified not merely by its crude colonial topee

508 The Small Voice of History

but also by the liberal toga it dons so often on the academic scene, what
about, say, the London School of Economics and Political Science
among the ancients, and the University of Sussex among the moderns,
where students are inducted into the rationale of that thinly disguised
imperialist procedure known, euphemistically, as the economics of
foreign aid and overseas development? In British universities imperialist
attitudes with regard to India are by no means limited to the study of
the nationalist movement alone nor to the problem of social change up
to 1 947. Nor are these exclusively epitomized in any single scholar or
institution. The academic ramifications of these ideas are far stronger
and wider than Dr Mukherjee suggests, and it takes much more than
a few random jabs at arbitrarily selected targets to expose these.

But let us, in all humility, turn the light inwards. Surely Dr Mukher-
jee, who is himself a product of SOAS and had a longer association
with it than most Indians, would require no reminder of the context
in which Professor Philips operates. If any false notions about Indian
history originate with him and his colleagues, it is still the Indians
themselves, clients for PhD degrees, who feed on these without
resentment, nurture the lymph carefully in their minds through years
of unquestioning application, process the falsehood into dissertational
form, and, having pocketed the coveted degrees, come back home as
carriers. In due course, the dissertations turn into books, learned pap-
ers, and lecture notes, and their authors, now saddled into academic
positions themselves, start spawning false ideas in their own turn. This
is a vicious circle, and if we have to break out of it at all, we must
combine our criticism of British academic attitudes with a good deal
of honest soul-searching ourselves.

And here we come to the heart of the matter. It is not quite so
accidental that the message of the civilizing mission has found an
active and self-perpetuating medium in so many of our compatriots.
For, there is a curious complicity between the peddlers of what, for
want of a better name, may be called the SOAS line on Indian nation-
alism and some of those who amongst us are the most vocal in de-
nouncing it. It is a complicity of elites in a shared fabrication. let us
have a close look at Dr Mukherjee s own ideas on the subject and his
strategy of research*.

509

The Movement for National Freedom in India

The substance of his argument is as follows:

nationalism in India is a product of the disruption of the old economic
and social order. The disruption took place . . . because of the growth
of a market society, the process of which was accelerated by the estab-
lishment of British rule [p. 16, para. 1] . . . Through the land
settlements and through extensive trade the British helped the growth
of a market economy in India [ibid., para. 2]. The direct effect of the
growth of this market society was a large scale social mobility ... This
created a new social elite . . Those who could earn enough wealth or
achieve some intellectual standing through the new English education
could be accepted as members of this elite [pp. 16-17] . . . They were
a group who recognized their new status, which they owed to the new
economy and the British rule [p. 17, para. 1] . . . The political deve-
lopment of modern India since the beginning of the nineteenth cen-
tury can be considered as the history of the struggle of this class to find
a new identity [ibid., para. 2] . . . Many works on the ‘freedom
movement’ are now being written solely based on the political writings
of the leading Indians and the British officers. But this method ignores
the social mobility which created the elite . . . This social mobility
may be considered the positive response to the growth of the market
society, while the peasant revolts, heroic as they were, were a negative
response to this development [ibid., para. 3].

If this is Dr Mukherjee’s understanding of the genesis of Indian
nationalism, he is very close indeed to the Philips point of view. There
is nothing in the logic of this argument which should not be accept-
able to the SOAS historian or even welcomed by him. He would
simply point out that it was the British administrative measures which
‘through the land settlements and through extensive trade* helped
to accelerate* the development of a market society’ which, in its
turn, generated ‘social mobility* resulting in the emergence of an elite,
a new class’ whose struggle to find a new identity* was, according to
Dr Mukherjee, synonymous with ‘the political development of modern
India*. It would, therefore, follow that Indian ‘nationalism was solely
the product of British rule* — a conclusion Dr Mukherjee seems to
abhor on p. 15 and then goes on to affirm himself at great length in
the next two pages. The SOAS man would even feign surprise that

510

The Small Voice of History

Dr Mukherjee having thus come more than half the way to meet his
point of view should object to John Beams s characterization of the
Ilbert Bill agitators as ‘place-hunting and power-hunting more or less
disguised’ (p. 11). Was it not by hunting for places and power, he
would ask, that in the last analysis the new social elite’ could best in-
dicate their ‘positive response to the growth of the market society’ and
establish ‘their new status’, their new identity’?

Any attempt by Dr Mukherjee to salvage the rest of his argument
at this stage by the suggestion that the search for a new identity was
expressed in the urge for social reform would be dealt with by the
simple reminder that most of the ideas of social reform were derived
from, though they were not identical with, the Christian, utilitarian,
and positivist concepts imbibed through the new English education’
which the elite, particularly the Bengal ‘bhadraloks’, desperately
sought to acquire in order to qualify for places and for power. That they
also invoked the shastras from time to time was, as Dr Mukherjee him-
self says, simply designed ‘to gain sanction for their actions’ (p. 16).
Social reformism, the SOAS man would say, was primarily an attempt
on the part of ‘the new social elite’ to seek a superstructural readjustment
conforming to ‘their new status.’

Why then did ‘they tend to belittle the Indians’ (p. 14)? Belittle
how? Which are ‘the textbooks of Indian history’ where British authors
have ‘generally ignored’ Rammohan Roy’s role in the reform move-
ment? Dr Mukherjee would be very hard put indeed to name any. And
Gandhi? Well, one has simply to look at the British postage stamp
issued in the Gandhi centenary year and read about the pomp of the
memorial meeting at the Royal Albert Hall to realize how the entire
British Establishment, royalty and all, can rise to pay homage to the
naked fakir’. There was even a special lecture and tea at SOAS to cele-
brate the occasion. No, there could be no question of belittling the
class of Indians Dr Mukherjee is primarily concerned with. On the
contrary, the record of their collaboration in the early phases of the
nationalist movement has been fully and enthusiastically acknowledged.
For they recognized — and Dr Mukherjee seems to be saying it himself,
in spite of one or two sentimental pulls in a contrary direction — that
‘if nationalism were purely the product of the British administration,
the best thing for the Indians to do would be to co-operate’ (pp. 14—
1 5) . They tried their best, didn’t they? And Dr Mukherjee is quite right.

The Movement far National Freedom in India 5 1 1

too, in dating the birth of Indian nationalism very close to 1 885 (‘It
came to Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century and to
India about eighty years later’, p. 1 1) — the year of the birth of the
Indian National Congress as a body of avowed co-operators. For it was
by co-operating with the administration of which they were the direct
beneficiaries that the elite could best hope to assert their ‘new identity’
and express their positive response to the growth of the market
society’. If it became increasingly difficult to co-operate after 1905,
and particularly after 1 920, this was surely due to the ‘negative res-
ponse’ of the peasantry. Just leave that ‘negative response’ out of your
history and you get Indian nationalism in its pristine and purest form.
No, Professor Philips need not get unduly upset: Dr Mukherjee has
unlearnt nothing of what he was taught at SOAS!

Nationalism Reduced to
‘Official Nationalism’

Benedict Anderson introduces his book. Imagined Communities ,
by dismissing liberal and Marxist theories of nationalism ‘as
a late Ptolemaic effort to save the phenomena and offers us
some tentative suggestions for a more satisfactory interpretation in
order, presumably, to answer the need for a reorientation of perspective
in, as it were, a Copernican spirit’ (Anderson 1983: 13). The theoreti-
cal revolution does not quite materialize. Instead, what we have here
is a medley of digressions, anecdotes, aphorisms, bons mots , and some
wildly irrelevant footnotes which combine with a modicum of reasoning
to give this essay the charm of an after-dinner academic conversation
over port and cigar. But once the aroma and the fume have cleared, the
reader is left with a wisp of a thesis which is as diverting as it is fragile.

The thesis is that nationalism is a cultural artefact’ (ibid.) and the
nation is an imagined political community — and imagined as both
inherently limited and sovereign’ (ibid.: 1 3). To identify nation thus
as community’ is of course correct, but this is no more than the empty
correctness of a tautology. For what could the nation be other than a
community when the lexical equivalent of the latter term is given as a
society of people linked together by common conditions of life, beliefs
etc. or organized under one authority’ (Garmonsway 1965: 145)?

And why ‘imagined’? Because, says Anderson, ‘In feet, all communi-
ties larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps

Copyright © 1 985 Ranajit Guha. First published in The Asian Studies Asso-
ciation of Australia Review, 9, 1, July 1985, pp. 103-8.

Nationalism Reduced to 'Official Nationalism ' 513

even these) are imagined’ (Anderson 1983: 1 5) . Well, if all communities
are necessarily imagined and the nation is a community, why bother
to use the adjective ‘imagined’ any more than say ‘round’ to describe
a circle? There is little in this definition to help us grasp the specificity
of the nation as a political community and distinguish it from political
communities of any other kind.

Neither do the adjectival phrases ‘limited’ and ‘sovereign’ take us
much farther. It goes without saying that a community is limited and
it is not customary to describe it as coterminous with all of mankind —
except, perhaps, in the rhetoric of the United Nations.

And as for the nation being imagined as ‘inherently sovereign’, I
am not sure what to make of this phrase. The three sentences devoted
to this point (Anderson 1983: 16) appear, somewhat obscurely, to
suggest a causal relation between the decline of absolute monarchy in
Western Europe and the aspiration for a national sovereign state. It is
true that the rise of the nation state is nearly contemporaneous with the
decline of absolutism, but it is difficult to see how one follows from the
other. For although the fall of the Habsburgs stimulated nationalist
movements in parts of the disintegrating Austro-Hungarian empire
and these had the demand for a sovereign state inscribed on their
respective banners, there are the contrary instances of England and
France where the rise of nationalism occurred within states which
were already sovereign. Here the national sentiment focused on is-
sues like parliamentary autonomy and republicanism to consoli*
date and broaden the base of a pre-existent sovereignty. And outside
Europe there is the familiar case of India where, in the nineteenth
century, a middle-class nationalism remained untroubled by any
dreams of sovereignty and was content to grovel in an obsequious
loyalism towards the Raj (Sitaramayya 1969: 19, 61).

Which brings me to the question of the validity of Anderson’s the-
sis for Indian nationalism. It would be taking a narrow view of that
phenomenon if we were to account for its origin and development
primarily in terms of print capitalism and what the author calk ‘official
nationalism’ or ‘Russification’. Indeed it would be taking a typically
colonialist view. According to that view, Britain created the Indian
nation and did so by disseminating liberal ideas through Western-style
schools and universities among an indigenous elite made up mostly of

514 The Small Voice of History

the landed gentry and professional middle classes whose members
generated nationalist politics through the dual process of collaboration
with the regime and competition for jobs and resources provided
by its bureaucratic apparatus and governmental institutions. This
view, aired first at the end of the last century, has been entrenched in
colonialist historiography since Dodwell and the Cambridge History of
India. And it is still going strong, fifty years later, in the work of the so-
called Cambridge School, represented best by Gallagher and Seal. In
view of the use made of the Indian experience at the core of the argu-
ment in this thesis (Anderson 1983: 86-9) and its claim to interpret
all nationalisms since 1 820, it is bad to see it so completely dominated
by the colonialist point of view.

The error of that poi nt ofview lies in its onesidedness. By conceptual-
izing nationalism exclusively in terms of interaction between the
indigenous elite and the colonizers, it fails to acknowledge and explain
the sturdy nationalism of the mass of the people, especially the Indian
peasantry. It was they, and not the loyalist elite, who alone resisted the
Raj (often with arms) during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
and sketched out, albeit imperfectly and in quasi-religious idioms, any
alternative to British rule that was not designed specifically to restore
landed magnates of the pre-colonial era to power. And even in the
twentieth century, who would have known of Gandhi, Nehru, or
the Congress Party but for the millions of peasants who mobilized in
the three big waves of the nationalist movement in 1 920-2, 1 930-2,
and 1942—6? As recent work on Indian history (e.g. Gyanendra
Pandcy s and Sumit Sarkars) has established beyond doubt, much of
this movement originated in popular initiatives independently of elite
leadership. The life of this movement at the grassroots derived from
primordial power relations and traditional ideologies that had little
to do with either the culture or the institutions of the Raj. Indeed, the
Indian experience shows that nationalism straddled two relatively
autonomous but linked domains of politics — an elite domain and a
subaltern domain. The great nationalist campaigns of the twentieth
century, which brought British rule to an end in the subcontinent,
were situated at the intersection of these two domains, of which only
the former, namely, the elite domain, may perhaps be understood to
an extent in terms of the impact of print capitalism and ‘Russification*.

Nationalism Reduced to '< Official Nationalism 5 1 5

But to think of the whole of Indian nationalism as the property of that
domain alone would be to take a monistic view that ignores the facts
of the situation and its complexity.

In the case of a pre-industrial society like colonial India where the
peasantry constituted the main fighting force of the nationalist move-
ment, it makes little sense to explain the latter in exclusively liberal-
culturalist terms, for peasant politics was at this time still largely
informed by traditional values and beliefs untouched by liberal ideas.
It makes no sense either to seek the reason for the spread of that na-
tionalism in dissemination along an administrative network. For even
the vast colonial bureaucracy of British India lacked the numbers and
the competence to penetrate directly to the village level, so that the
most subordinate local officer would be regarded by the rural masses
more as an alien figure to be shunned and feared than as an ally to work
with in a nationalist campaign. And in so far as Indian nationhood had
a large peasant component in it, it would make little sense to charac-
terize it simply as a ‘cultural artefact’, as if the peasant’s striving towards
a nationalist consciousness had nothing to do with the striving of a
peasant economy towards a national market.

It would be rash to generalize on the basis of South Asia alone. But
the experience of Eastern Europe which serves as materiel for all theo-
ries of nationalism, also underscores the peasantry’s importance in
nation-formation. All authorities agree, for instance, on the influence
the Hussite revolt of the fifteenth century, a peasant war sometimes
described as the most powerful anti-feudal struggle of the mass of the
people in the medieval period’, had on the growth of Czech nationalism.
For two centuries, following that event, it was the peasantry, ‘still the
most nationally conscious Czech stratum’, who alone kept national-
ism alive* until it was revived and developed into a broad movement
in the nineteenth century under the leadership of a man from a peasant
family — Frantisek Palacky (Seton- Watson 1977: 150-1; Sugar and
Lederer 1971: 168-86).

Palacky s contribution to Czech nationalism earned for him the
sobriquet ‘Father of the Nation’. Something of th “ same generative role
was played by the peasantry in Romania as well. There, even in Walla-
chia and Moldavia, dominated largely by the aristocracy, the anti-
Greek uprising led by Vladimirescu, a small landowner, was as much

516

The Small Voice of History

social as national’, thanks to the large-scale participation of peasants
who wished to be freed from the oppression of the landlord and
the tax-collector’ (Seton- Watson 1977: 177-8). And, in Transyl-
vania, national resentment of Romanians against Hungarians’ was an
important aspect of the widespread revolt led by Horia, a peasant, in
1784 (ibid.: 177). The peasant element impressed itself firmly again
on the nationalist movement in the course of the revolutions of 1 848
and made itself dramatically visible in the historic assembly at the 'field
of liberty’ at Blaj when 40,000 peasants put forward a set of well-
defined demands for political and cultural representation as the con-
dition for the Romanian nation’s unity with Hungary (ibid.: 178).
Indeed, in this region, as Fischer-Galati has pointed out (Sugar and
Lederer 1971: 388), Romanian nationalism drew its power no less
from the peasant s urge for liberation from the feudal yoke than from
the cultural aspirations of the bourgeoisie and their drive to enlist the
peasant as ‘a customer of Romanian commercial and banking interests
in a national market’ (ibid.). Again, in Serbia and Bulgaria, the indi-
genous nobility and merchant classes had not matured enough to con-
tribute significantly to the development of the national sentiment in
its formative period. In their absence, it was the peasantry who acted
as the architects of nationalism. ‘The facts that the landlords were
mostly foreigners and that the traditional institutions and language of
the peasantry had survived centuries of foreign rule . . . furnished the
ingredients for the development of a popular nationalism’ (ibid.: 53).

The omission of this experience (hardly compensated by an occa-
sional nod in the direction of ‘popular nationalism’) has a foreshortening
effect on Anderson’s thesis and seriously undermines its value as an
explanation of the ‘origin’ of nationalism. It also traps him into a two-
stage schema with the 1820s serving to demarcate popular nationalism’
from ‘official nationalism (Anderson 1 983: 66). This periodization is,
of course, hard to justify. For, as the foregoing discussion on South Asia
and Eastern Europe has amply demonstrated, official nationalism’ did
not replace popular nationalism’ at all after the 1820s. On the con-
trary, the two continued to flow in parallel and occasionally braided
streams well beyond that decade into the second half of the nineteenth
century, and at least in the Asian case into the twentieth.

Some of these difficulties arise from the manner in which the re-
lation between language and nation has been constructed in this essay.

Nationalism Reduced to ' Official Nationalism * 517

In this, as in much else, the author relies heavily on Seton-Watson
(Seton- Watson 1977: 148; passim ), but, unlike the latter, argues him-
self into a corner by reducing language almost entirely into a function
of print capitalism. The result has been to allow literacy to usurp the
role of language in the history of nationalism and thereby to represent
that phenomenon primarily as a transaction between a literate ruling
elite and its ilhtesy a literate minority among the ruled. In this pas de
deux there is nothing for a pre-literate peasant population to do ex-
cept to look on. This relegates to the limbo not only the Czech peasant
whose pride in his language was the only force to sustain nationalism
in Bohemia between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, but also,
in our own time, the peasantry of Bangladesh whose want of familiarity
with Bengali in its graphic form did not prevent them from fighting
for its recognition as a central issue in their twenty-year-long struggle
for independence.

As these instances show, nationalism does not need print capitalism
to sire it. Given the right combination of other material and spiritual
factors, it can develop within a speech community through the mutual
recognition of its members and the exclusion of those who do not
belong there. Under such conditions the primordial bonding, which
is evoked sentimentally in Chapter 8 of the book without being inte-
grated in the main argument, should be enough to give rise to nation-
alism within a community. Newspapers can help to disseminate an
already growing nationalism, but I doubt if they can be said to have a
generative role. And thanks to the want of literacy and means of trans-
port, even that dissemination is often limited, as it was in India, to a
very small urban readership at the initial stages. That was true of the
Indian novel as well, not the least because of the excessively high cost
of its production, since a book had often to be financed by subscriptions
collected before a manuscript was sent to the printers.

Anderson’s attempt to make the novel into an epitome of the idea
of the nation is also far from convincing. He is right in describing the
so-called realistic novel of nineteenth-century England or France, that
is, the novel produced in a mature capitalist socety of that period, as
a device for the presen tation of simultaneity in “homogeneous, empty
tine”’ (Anderson 1983: 30-1), but wrong in generalizing it into a
'technical means for “re-presenting” the kind of imagined commun-
ity that is the nation (ibid.: 30). He is wrong because ‘the idea of the

5 1 8 The Small Voice of History

nation . . . conceived as a solid community moving steadily down (or
up) history* cannot be said to be a precise analogue, in all historical
instances , of ‘the idea of a sociological organism moving calendrically
through homogeneous, empty time* (ibid.: 30). For there could be
moments in a nations life when its self-image would be that of a com-
munity returning to itself along a trajectory of cyclical time rather than
floating steadily or ‘calendrically along the stream of history. The flow
of homogeneous time in the narrative of a nationalist novel produced
at such moments could be overdetermined by cyclical time to the point
of being totally absorbed by the latter. That is indeed what happens
in Bankimchandra Chattopadhyays Anandamath , written in 1882
and universally acknowledged as India’s most influential nationalist
novel. In other words, it is the specific historical condition of the
growth and functioning of a nationalist ideology which determines
whether its discursive vehicle will move in homogeneous or cyclical
time. A twenty-four-carat bourgeois nationalism, a realistic novel in its
pure* form and absolutely homogeneous time, would of course make
an ideal match. But history, with its penchant for messing up idealities,
allows for the emergence of nationalism in pre-capitalist societies
where cyclicity may continue to weigh heavily on homogeneous time
and the nationalise myth on the nationalist novel. In this sense, the
predicament of the nationalist novel with its not-too-rare lapses into
millenarianism, utopianism, and other happy endings is symptomatic
of the predicament of nationalism in many Third World countries.

I have found little in this essay which may be said to add significantly
to our understanding of nationalism. As a student of South Asian
history, I am shocked at the poor quality of the homework on that re-
gion, as witness the howler which cites the nationalist leader B.C. Pal
as an authority still writing angrily ‘a quarter of a century after India
became independent* (ibid.: 88) — that is, forty years after his death in
1932. Above all, l am disappointed that the argument should be so
wanting in rigour in a wurk designed as a major theoretical intervention.
I have looked in vain for the Copernican perspective promised in the
introduction. If the sun had indeed been going round our planet
before the publication of Imagined Communities, it is perhaps still
doing so.

Nationalism Reduced to ‘ Official Nationalism 519

References

Anderson, B. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread
of Nationalism. London: Verso.

Garmonsway, G.N. 1965. The Penguin English Dictionary. Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books.

Seton-Watson, H. 1977. Nations and States. London: Methuen.

Sitaramayya, B.R 1969. History of the Indian National Congress, vol. 1. Delhi:
S. Chand.

Sugar, P.F. and I.J. Lederer, eds, 1971. Nationalism in Eastern Europe. Seattle
and London: University of Washington Press.

Nationalism and the Trials
of Becoming

The Netaji Research Bureau has done me a singular honour by
inviting me to join you at these celebrations of Netaji s 105th
birthday. A birthday anniversary is always the occasion for
renewal, as Rabindranath has taught us to think. One of his last lyrics
on this theme speaks of all such renewals as the articulation of life's
triumph. In paying our homage this evening to a historic instance
of life’s triumph, let us invoke the spirit of the new by reading, once
again, the story of that life as told by Netaji himself in his autobiography.
In my own reading of that text I am deeply indebted to its first editor,
the late Dr Sisir Kumar Bose. Much of what I know of Netaji s life and
times owes largely to Sisir Kumar s work as a historian and archivist.
I dedicate this lecture to his memory.

Since the end of the Second World War the study of Indian nation-
alism has acquired a distinctive bias. It is a statist bias which induces
the assimilation of all significant aspects of nationalism to the thematics
of statehood. The concepts of nation and nation-state have, as a result,
moved close enough to appear as nearly identical. Nowhere is this
tendency more explicit than in historiography which seems incapable
of addressing the question of nationalism without clinging to the
idea of statehood as its core. The actual emergence of an independent
nation-state and its exciting career have helped to make this tendency
look almost natural. It is as if the common sense of the new nation

Nationalism and the Trials of Becoming 52 1

implicitly trusted its highest achievement, that is, accession to sovere-
ignty, as an unerring measure for assessments of its past. According
to this view, it would be in order, therefore, to deal with every single
moment of nationalism as an anticipation of its ultimate outcome,
namely, the formation of a nation-state.

How are we to justify such an approach to the study of our national
past? To ask that question is already a step taken towards shifting the
central problematic of nationalism to a ground where it will no longer
be hostage to statist interpretation. For beyond the latter s grasp there
was a broad open country where, for many who had participated in
India’s struggle for freedom, nationalism meant a good deal more than
mere state power. To situate the study of nationalism in that region one
can do no better than to turn to Subhas Chandra Bose s autobiography,
An Indian Pilgrim }

Of the many suggestions with which the word pilgrim* resonates in
the title of Netaji s work there is one that is often regarded as the key
to its contents. It is the notion that the pilgrim already knows where
he is going. To presume that would of course enable interpretation to
move smoothly towards a goal identified without difficulty as a parti-
cular political objective such as independence, statehood, self-determi-
nation, or any other idea subsumed under the concept of nationalism.
However, the problem with this approach is that it sends the pilgrim
off on his journey in blinkers. He is not free to see, far less contemplate,
the landscape through which he passes. Programmed to follow an
itinerary with a named destination, he comes to know his way only so
far as that destination requires or permits him to do so. As that prede-
termined end, nationalism conceived merely as the spirit of a nation-
state would rob him of all the excitement and sense of wonder which
a genuine tryst with destiny might involve.

The difficulty becomes obvious if one looks at the title of the book
without taking its transparency for granted. The word pilgrim* here
has a clearly religious connotation as it stands. But transfer it to the
lexicon of the author’s mother tongue and it starts to equivocate. Read
as paribrajak (which is not the only available synonym, as we shall

1 Subhas Chandra Bose, An Indian Pilgrim , ed. Sisir Kumar Bose (London:
Asia Publishing House, 1965). Hereafter A/P.

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presently see) it could mean either a person for whom wandering was
a sacred duty involving mendicancy, visits to holy sites, and so forth,
or someone who had taken to travelling simply as a secular exercise. It
was this secular aspect that seems to have appealed to young Subhas
when he wrot^to a friend in Bangla about his urge to emulate the
paribrajak's free and individualistic way of life by going on a trek from
Darjeeling across the mountains towards Sikkim, Nepal, and even as
far as Tibet. But this context has not been taken into account in the
authorized English versioaof the letter.2

Translated as wandering pilgrim' the phrase anticipates by two
decades the mature forty-year-old politicians characterization of his
passage through life as that of the other kind of paribrajaky i.e. a pil-
grim in the spiritual sense. And then to add a further twist, the pilgrim
of the title reappears some forty-three years later in the Bangla edi-
tion of the work as pathik or secular wayfarer of common parlance.
Translated doubly — that is, from English into Bangla in the linguis-
tic register and from the religious into the secular in the ideological
register — the phrase an Indian pilgrim5 rendered ‘Bharat pathik
would serve now to highlight the road rather than the destination.3 *

1 regard this ambiguity as an authentic symptom of nationalism in
the process of its formation. For the slippage between the secular and
the religious speaks of an uncertainty of meaning that haunts the very
process of growing up as a nationalist in this period. It was a process
that had not evolved sufficiently yet to know its direction or realize its
potential without facing a choice between the two registers or indeed
a host of other alternatives. The flip from one interpretation to the
other — and all translation is interpretation — alerts us, therefore, to
what is in essence an ontological instability. It prompts us to grapple
with the historicality of nationalism at its roots by asking: What is it
to be a nationalist? What did it mean for a youth to fashion himself as
a nationalist in the early years of the twentieth century?

These are some of the questions that the author of An Indian
Pilgrim might have had in mind when he traced the point ofhi* depar
ture back to a zone where the meanings of nationalism were srill far

2 AlPy p. 1 57. Letter no. 34 of 20 November 1915.

3 See ‘Bharat Pathik — Ekti Asamapta Atmajibani’, in Subhas Chandra

Basu, Samagra Racanabaliy vol. 1 (Kolkaca: Ananda Publishers, 1980).

Nationalism and the Trials of Becoming 523

from clear. Which is perhaps why he decided to devote a substantial
part of this, alas, unfinished work to considerations about the indefinite-
ness of his own beginning. It is as if he had to probe the obscurities of
seed-time in order to understand the growth. And since seed-time
bears within it the movement of what has been towards what will be,
Netaji situates his life between infancy and adolescence in an age of
transition, as he calls it. However, it is a transition that operates at two
levels: it has for its referent not only that particular age, but the self as
well. The historicality of the phenomenon is studied best therefore in
the light that time and being throw on each other in this narrative.

The author describes that age of transition as probably an age of
political immaturity.’ The adverbial touch of hesitation need not be
taken too seriously. For in his opinion none even amongst the great of
that era, such as Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar and Bankim Chandra
Chattopadhyay, not to speak of his own father and uncle amongst
lesser men, could be said to have been free from such immaturity de-
fined by him as that state of separation between morality and politics
which allowed one ‘to obey the dictates of morality and not land one-
self in political trouble.’ All of them were ‘men of the highest moral
stature’, but compromised, according to him, by not being opposed
strongly enough to British rule (. AIP : 16-17).

The morality of politics had clearly been valued upwards and stand-
ards set higher since then, thanks to the upsurge of anti-colonialist
feeling in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Netaji, like
many of his contemporaries, owed much of his own development to
that very experience. Yet reminiscing in 1 937 as one of the foremost
leaders of the country he was still modest enough to look back on
himself as a typical child of those times. Although that period had
culminated in the Swadeshi movement and ‘a sharpening of political
consciousness’, he grew up in its wake as an adolescent who, by his own
estimate, was somewhat retarded in political consciousness. As evidence
of his being politically so undeveloped’ he mentions how in 191 1, at
the age of fourteen, he was still silly enough to sit for an essay competi-
tion on the coronation of King George V. He did not get the prize. But
it was not so much a sense of failure as the shame of juvenile loyal-
ism that rankled long enough to make its way into the work. ‘It would
be correct to say’, he observes unforgivingly, ‘that, as long as I was at
school, I did not mature politically’ (AIP: 39-40).

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This confession of political innocence is worth some pondering.
Where does it belong in the chronicle of a nationalist pilgrimage? A
perfectly legitimate, if all too simple, answer would be to regard the ab-
jection it speaks of as the lowest depth against which to measure the
subsequent struggles and assess the difference as a record of heightened
moral and political consciousness. That would make for a good pro-
gressive account of the freedom movement, and I see no problem
about that except perhaps in one respect. In such an account the indi-
vidual element of all that constitutes nationalism in thought and deed
is likely to merge in the aggregative. It will be there merely as an
undifferentiated moment in a lump that has no room in it for the
concreteness of a pilgrims own experience of the road — the agony of
choices made for a journey undertaken entirely on his own, the turns
taken or not taken with rewards and penalties accruing to him alone,
and the horizon opening up on perspectives he can claim to be uni-
quely his. In other words, it is the concreteness of becoming which the
story of nationalism told in the aggregate is likely to miss out.

It seems to me that this is not the only possible approach to Netaji s
autobiography. There is yet another history in this text, a history of the
self which shows up on closer reading. It takes nothing away from the
aggregative picture, but to the contrary enriches it substantially. We
have the authors own guidance in this reading as he situates the self
first in the general background and then goes on to tell the story of its
striving towards its development as a young nationalist. To start with,
the existential question that underlies this process is traced by him to
its roots in the problem of political morality. What is significant about
this observation for our understanding of nationalism is that it
displaces the relation of politics and morality from the contingency of
public affairs and grounds it in the broader and far more intricate con-
tingency of life itself: ‘The individual has to go through the experience
of his race within the brief span of his own life and I remember quite
clearly that I too passed through the stage of what I may call non-politi-
cal morality, when I thought that moral development was possible
while steering clear of politics . . . But now I am convinced that life is
one whole. If we accept an idea, we have to give ourselves wholly to it
and allow it to transform our entire life' (AlP. 17-18).

The shift requires life to be invoked here at two levels — the level of
man in his species-being and that of the human individual — and the

525

Nationalism and the Trials of Becoming

problematic defined in terms of their reciprocities. All that concerns
the individual in his transactions with others to make up his world as
society, community, nation, and so forth belongs to the space where
the two levels overlap in a shared experience mediated by individuality.
The loyalism the schoolboy had inherited as ‘the experience of his
race’ according to a generational logic beyond his control was therefore
already subject to the contrary pull of his innermost experience. It
would enable him to say with conviction, as he did later on, that life
was one whole, and that an idea when it gripped an individual must
be allowed to transform his entire life. But such ripeness was yet to
come. For the moment the legacy to which he had been born weighed
still too heavily to encourage any break with the culture of collaboration
prevailing in the region and within the family, Orissa, he observes, was
a political backwater and even the anti-partition agitations of 1904-
8 caused little more than a ripple in Cuttack where he grew up, while
politics, he says in the memoirs, was ‘tabooed in our house’ (AIP: 40).

But this was a period of transition and there is nothing that does not
move, however imperceptibly, at such times. Turning to the central
metaphor of the work, one could say that there was no obvious sign of
a pilgrimage about to begin at this point of the narrative — no path or
direction, far less a destination, although enough is said to indicate the
very first stirrings of an obscure movement. Looking back, the author
reflects on this movement as the sign of a growing alienation. ‘The
earliest recollection I have of myself’, he writes, ‘is that I used to feel
like a thoroughly insignificant being’ (AIP: 2).

That sense of insignificance is then documented at some length. He
felt distantiated from his parents to the point of being overawed’. Yet,
this made him ‘yearn for a more intimate contact with them’ and envy
those ‘lucky enough to be on friendly terms with their parents.’ As the
ninth child of his parents, he was lost in a crowd of siblings. ‘The pre-
sence of so many elder brothers and sisters seemed to relegate me into
utter insignificance’, he says: ‘I started life with a sense of diffidence’
(AIP: 3).

The situation at the primary school did not help in this respect
either. His grades were all right, but no notice was taken of that. What
could have made some difference was sports, but he was not good at
it. So his sense of being a nonentity at home was reinforced at school
during the critical period of growth between the age of five and twelve.

526

The Small Voice of History

No wonder that he came ‘to cherish a poor opinion of himself, as he
put it. Haunted by ‘a feeling of insignificance— of diffidence’, he got
into ‘the habit of looking up to others and of looking down upon
[him] self’ (AIP: 24).

The portrait etched so sharply by these phrases is that of a lonely,
insecure child stranded in the world. Trapped in a ‘shy reserve’ — an
introversion he would find ii hard to shake off even later in life (AIP:
4) — he fails to connect with others at home. It is an equally telling
measure of his isolation that he made no friends at all with his fellows
during the first seven years of his life as a schoolboy from 1 902 to 1 908
(AIP: 27). It did bother him, of course, to feel so ill adjusted to his en-
vironment, particularly because he could not explain it. ‘At that time’,
he says, ‘it was quite impossible for me to understand what had gone
wrong with me’ (AIP: 24). In other words, he saw alienation staring at
him, and the image that met his eyes was a stranger’s.

That figure of the child who is already not at home in what should
have been the intimacy of family and school at such a tender age is, it
seems to me, pivotal for our understanding of this work as a narrat-
ive of mourning and homecoming. For it testifies to an acute sense of
loss as the defining principle of the author’s perception of him-
self between infancy and youth. At the same time he does not let his
readers forget, if only because he cannot do so himself, that it is the
story of a child who is homeless, existentially speaking. Now, we know
that the English word ‘home’ translates in many Indie languages
as griha or its cognates such as geha, ghar , and so forth. These are all
based on the radical grab that signifies taking hold of or grasping or
seizing firmly enough to form a strong attachment between agent
and object (P 3. 1 . 143 & P 3. 1 .144). Etymology is witness thus to the
depth and antiquity of a tradition that imbues the concept of home
in South Asian cultures with all the affect of a primordial belonging.
The loss of home as that primordial belonging is what is mourned in
Netaji’s account of his early life.

By the same token but bending the other way in a compensatory
gesture, the pilgrimage turns out to be a project of homecoming. But
as we know from the traveller s own recollections in this fragment
as well as from what is unsaid but can be read from the open book of
his life cut so cruelly short, homecoming for him would always be

Nationalism and the Trials of Becoming 527

shadowed by the sense of that initial loss. The wound it was intended
to heal would continue to hurt, if not fester.

It is no secret that the verbiage of nationalism seeks often to hide
such pain in a rhetoric of cheerful exuberance. Based on the maxim
‘Alls well that ends well’, it misleads by allowing the ultimate hurrah
of arrival to drown the sigh and grieving that had been the pilgrims lot
on his journey. For the ego, says Freud, tends not to keep too careful
an account of the economy of pain caused by mourning. It is to the
credit of our author that he does not yield to the temptation, but is on
the contrary lucid and brave enough to document it. Growing up as
a nationalist had been, for him, an urge to set out in search of that
originary home he could not find in his family environment. By own-
ing up honestly to that fact, he has left us a testament which has a
validity far beyond his personal experience. For it probes some of the
depths of nationalism at a level where its true historicality had already
been sprouting in the incipience of self-estrangement.

We have seen how the self was locked up in an alienating diffidence
and nagged by its worry. ‘What is happening to me?’ Ringed in by the
present, the question hurtled back. It was an intolerable containment
that seemed to have no end. But end it did under the impact of life itself
and the force of circumstance. Life, because Subhas was now twelve,
a child who had reached adolescence with all its thrust and pressure;
and circumstance, because it was time for him to move from junior to
high school. So the trapdoor snapped open miraculously to let in the
future, and with it some light, and even the promise, if no positive indi-
cation yet of path and direction. In short, alienation yields at this point
to possibility and along with die latter — anxiety.

It is difficult not to notice the space and attention devoted in this
work to the ensuing phase of the authors life. This extends from 1 909
when he is admitted to the Ravenshaw Collegiate School in Cuttack
through his university days in Calcutta until his departure for England
in 1919 — an entire decade that merits all the emphasis it can get. For
it is during these years that he goes through those seismic upheavals
which would make him into what he was desdned to be — that is, a
nationalist, a moral personality described as a pilgrim. It is, as the text
insists, a period of great turbulence for him. Yet it is a turbulence that
is oriented towards freedom. Powered by anxiety, it enables the sense

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The Small Voice of History

of homelessness to break out of alienation and spring to life, uncoiled,
as a force that disrupts and directs at once. And the pilgrim, tied no
longer to the present nor numbed by inertia, can look forward into
the future, for he has, for the first time, a horizon and an open road
before him.

I wish to emphasize this point not only because of its importance
for the history of Netaji s own development but to show how truly
representative his experience was in this respect. For it constitutes one
of the most significant aspects of our freedom struggle. Since the days
of militant nationalism and Swadeshi through the anti-imperialist
upsurges of the Non-Cooperation, Civil Disobedience and Quit India
movements hundreds and thousands had enlisted precisely for this
difficult and dangerous pilgrimage. Not all lasted the full stretch, for
it was a stony path and hardly anyone returned unhurt. But each had
a story to tell — the story of anguished choice and bitter conflict, of
pitfalls and false leads, and in some rare instance a joyful, happy arrival.
Whatever the eventual outcome, it was almost always the story of a
young Indian leaving home to join others in their effort to make the
nation and motherland the home of the free.

In other words, there was a movement of individuation that ran
parallel to those mass campaigns of the nationalist era. Indeed the mass
aspect relies for its dynamics precisely on the energies of such indi-
viduation. There is nothing in which the latter shows up more force-
fully and effectively than in homelessness, which is why that theme is
so crucial to this text. It allows the narrative to weave self and nation,
warp and weft, into the fabric of an authentic historicality that makes
politics understandable in terms of its tension with becoming.

To be a nationalist is to learn to be on ones own as an individual very
much like the pilgrim who knows that even with all the others heading
in the same direction it will be entirely up to him to cope with the
loneliness and hardship of the pakdandi on his trek. The trek begins
for young Subhas already as he moves to high school. Wanting no
longer in self-assurance he finds it easier to make friends. But company,
by itself, does not rescue him from introversion. To the contrary, he is
driven inwards more than ever before in the knowledge that he is not
like the others either at school or even at home.

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Nationalism and the Trials of Becoming

Indeed it was within the family circle that his sense of being so dif-
ferent intensified into a conflict which would continue for about a
decade mentioned by him as one of the ‘stormiest’ and ‘trying’ periods
of his life [AIP\ 31, 35). As it often happened in a patriarchal set-up
in those days, it was his relation with his parents that was mostly at issue
in this tension. He had always felt distanced from them even as a child.
But now that he began to show signs of an adolescent waywardness and
they tried to keep him in line, he responded by breaking tether.

‘The more my parents endeavoured to restrain me, he writes, ‘the
more rebellious I became. ’ There was a time, not so long ago, when he
would routinely cite Sanskrit verses that prescribed obedience to ones
parents, but now he ‘took to verses which preached defiance.’ It was not
that it pleased him at all to defy them, but he simply could not help
doing so. ‘I was swept onwards as by an irresistible current’, he recalls,
and ‘began to feel more at home when away from home’ ( AIP : 35-6).

To be initiated into agency does not make life easy as a matter of
course. More often than not. it is a recipe for trouble. For to be on one’s
own is to be free to encounter possibility with the multitude — indeed,
the infinitude — of choice it has to offer. It is a risky freedom. From
now on all roads will be forked and the initiate will have no guide or
mentor of whom to ask his way. For him to go through life is therefore
to be torn by doubt and burdened by responsibility at every step and
thus to have his being perpetually suspended in anxiety. Which is
why anxiety has been so aptly described by Kierkegaard as ‘freedom’s
possibility' that is ‘absolutely educative’ for anyone who has to cope
with the hazards of agency.4

Our protagonist, too, has to go through that hard school of anxiety.
Driven by self-questioning and lacerated by the resistance it provokes,
he tries whatever he thinks has an answer for him. He gets in touch with
sadhus and seeks their advice, only to be disappointed in most cases.
He visits tirthas where pilgrims gather for spiritual inspiration, but is
not impressed by what he sees and hears. He learns to appreciate nature
and develops an interest in gardening as something practical to do. He

4 Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety (Princeton, New Jersey. Princeton
University Press, 1980), pp. 155-6, and chapter V passim.

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The Small Voice of History

takes to yogic exercises. He spends a lot of time in the company of his
friends discussing all kinds of things or working together with them on
community projects during the school holidays. More than anything
else, he reads and cogitates trying to understand what the shastras, and
generally speaking Indian tradition, have to offer as guidance.

What he is looking for is a way out of the difficulties in which the
problem of adolescent sexuality, compounded by that of estrangement
from his domestic environment, has landed him. He regards himself
as caught in a moral impasse and blames it on the wills failure to over-
come worldly temptation in its dual aspects, namely, lust for women
and greed for wealth, kamini and kancan , that constitute the traditio-
nal Indian paradigm of immorality. ‘What I required — and what I was
unconsciously groping after was’ , as he would formulate it in retrospect,
‘a central principle, which I could use as a peg to hang my whole life
on, and a firm resolve to have no other distractions in life’ (AIP\ 32).

It would not be long before he was to find this ‘central principle’ in
the teachings of Swami Vivekananda and accept it as an ideal to which
he believed he could devote his whole being ( AIP : 33) It was defined
for him by the maxim, aatmano mokshaartham jagaddhitaaya [ ca ],
that stood for the very ‘essence’ of Swamiji s teachings in his opinion.5
In a passage that is highly illuminating he indicates how those words
helped him to acquire a positively nationalist orientation in his think-
ing. ‘For your own salvation and for the service of humanity — that was
to be life’s goal’, he writes. A gloss follows to make it clear what the
phrase ‘service of humanity’ meant to him: ‘The service of Humanity
included, of course, the service of ones country’ (ibid.).

What was there in this teaching to anchor the restless soul? For an
answer one can start by considering the nature of that restlessness. It
is, as already noticed, a symptom of anxiety that has seized the self
which has sailed for away from its home port, but has nowhere to go.
Buffeted by the winds and tossed by the tides, it is adrift and confused
not only about its direction but its identity as well. It is at this point
that Vivekanandas teachings come to its rescue and help it to define
itself by its relationship with others constituting a world, a jagat,
where it may be at home again. To be in such a relationship means, of

5 The word ca seems to have been inadvertently left out of the citation.

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Nationalism and the Trials of Becoming

course, de-distantiation; it involves approaching, coming closer. One
of the closest relationships that can be experienced thus is, of course,
to be in ones own country and among ones own people. It is there that
one is in touch with humanity in all its concreteness, and Swamiji leads
Subhas to that most intimate of vicinities in belonging.

The radical modernity of this lesson is not lost on the young acolyte.
‘To the ancient scriptures [Vivekananda] had given a modern inter-
pretation, he would write years later, reflecting on the Master’s appeal
to his compatriots to regard all Indians — ‘the naked Indian, the illite-
rate Indian, the Brahman Indian the Pariah Indian — all of them as
brothers, that is, as equals (ibid.). Taken together with Swamiji s vision
of the future as the age of the Sudras this amounted, in effect, to a call
addressed to homo hierarchies to catch up at last with democracy.

What interests Subhas at this stage is not merely the idea behind the
call but its urgency as a call to action. For it summons the individual
to seek salvation by working for the hita of the world. Now ‘hita* as
used in Sanskrit (or Bangla for that matter) stands for what is meant
by ‘good* or ‘well-being in English. But Netaji insists on the need for
a clear distinction between his idea of hita and the good of Christian
or utilitarian thought. He does so presumably because, in his opi-
nion, 'the selfish monasticism of the middle ages’ put the emphasis on
the charitable benefactor in its concept of the good, while ‘the modern
utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill’ puts it on the needy beneficiary
{AIT. 33).

In his own interpretation the emphasis shifts from agent and object
to the means of beneficence, and the phrase jagaddhitaaya , as it occurs
in the maxim cited above, is rendered ‘for the service of humanity’. In
this expression, more paraphrase than translation, ‘service’ connotes
seva in the traditional sense of the word. It does so with an obvious nod
towards etymology. For hita, formed by the verbal root dhaa, could
also mean a condition of being placed or situated. Consequently, by
engaging in seva one would be posited in such a relation to the world
as to act with concern for others. In short, it is the affective rather than
the instrumental aspect that is brought out in full relief when service
is understood as seva. Freed from all suggestions of altruism, it enlarges
the world for the self and creates a space where the latter is at home at
last by caringly being with others.

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The Small Voice of History

Seva, in Netaji s opinion, implies shraddha . Here again he relies on
the teachings of Vivekananda who often used this term as a keyword
to urge his compatriots to cultivate faith in themselves. For an indi-
vidual to live up to such faith is to uphold his dignity as a human being.
‘Humanity itself is a dignity’, says Kant. It consists of a mans refusal
to be used merely as a means by anyone.6 Seva is perfectly consistent
with such dignity. Non-instrumenral by definition, it operates in a
world of affective relationships where the self-esteem of each is the
condition of respect for all. In other words, self-respect thrives in such
a moral environment by being predicated on mutual respect. Which
is why Vivekananda often spoke of self-respect and shraddha as the
very source of the strength Indians needed to overcome abjection as a
colonized people. Seva informed by shraddha would inspire them, he
thought, with a sense of power both as individuals and as a nation.

However, self-respect as self-empowerment, can provoke resistance.
The resistance may come from outside, that is, from pre-existing ar-
rangements displaced or modified by its impact. In other words, seva,
undertaken in the spirit of self-respect, can prove to be a threat to any
tightly-knit power structure. Recall, for instance, how the doctrine of
atmasakti or self-empowerment formulated by Rabindranath during
the Swadeshi movement was greeted by the Raj with the fear and
suspicion that characterized its attitude to sedition in those days.

But the resistance that self-respect meets in the public sphere is,
arguably, far less stubborn and painful than the other kind — that is,
the resistance within. There is something in the very concept of self-
respect that calls for it. For a person must submit himself to the test of
possibility if he has to earn his own respect. This is meant to find out
whether he measures up to the fulness of his potential in order to be-
come what he is, as Nietzsche would put it. It is not an easy test to
pass if only because to become what he is he must give up much that
impedes his becoming so. The tension involved in such giving up —
the tension of going away as the reciprocal of homecoming — is what
makes for tyag. Translated loosely in English as renunciation 01 sacri
fice and trivialized by indiscriminate use in common parlance, tyag

6 Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1991), p. 255.

533

Nationalism and the Trials of Becoming

speaks for the ethics of overcoming the lesistance of what stands in the
way of becoming. It works, in this role, closely with shraddha, the res-
pect an individual owes to others as one who is adequate to his own
possibility and entitled to his own respect.

By the time the storyline in this unfinished work snaps in order to
allow its author to attend to other duties, the protagonist had already
gone through the preliminaries of this test. He had defied patriarchal
authority and family tradition by asserting his right to choose what he
wanted to do with his own life. It pained him a lot to do so, but tough-
ened his fibre well enough to enable him to take a principled stand
over the Oaten affair. And then all he had taught himself about seva,
shraddha, and tyag converged, ironically, to turn his success in the
Indian Civil Service examination into a serious crisis of conscience.
Called upon to act according to the values he had come to cherish, he
weighed his options and decided on resigning in a historic gesture of
self-respect. The die is cast’, he wrote to his brother Sarat Chandra,
signalling that he had set out on his pilgrimage at last {AIP: 102).

‘The die is cast.' In these words Netaji sums up the experience of his
struggle to become a nationalist. It is an experience he shared with
myriad young men and women of his time. They too had been torn
between a host of agonizing choices. They too left the security of home,
profession, and livelihood to serve their people and by serving earn
their self-esteem. And at the hour of departure they, like young Subhas,
asserted, each in his or her small voice, ‘The die is cast.’

That story, plotted in the microcosm of a single life, as done in the
autobiography, brings out in sharp relief a dimension of national-
ism which required no programme to define it nor any institution to
endow it with legitimacy. This was an existential dimension to which
nationalism owed its character as a history of becoming. As such, it had
its historicality formed and rooted in decisions people took to authenti-
cate themselves by working, as individuals and in mass, for their right
to be free. In celebrating the 1 05th birthday of Netaji Subhas Chandra
Bose we pay our tribute to an illustrious life in which the trials of be-
coming were the dynamics that made dignity and self-respect the very
condition of Indian nationalism.

Foreword to the ‘Gita’

C | 'ihishma’ (Bhismaparvan) is not the beginning of the story of
the ‘Maha-bharata , yet it has an inaugural importance of
JLy its own as the first of five books in the narrative of the battle
itself. It shows that there was nothing more to be achieved by negotia-
tion between the Kurus and the Pandavas, and Bhishma was now ready
to act upon his decision to lead the former in the very first encounter
of the war. Since he was the wisest and most venerable patriarch of the
clan, this opening would be decisive for the outcome of the conflict,
making the ‘Maha-bharata a tale of a myriad deaths foretold.

An epic display of violence, ‘Bhishma’ raises the curtain on what is
about to unfold, canto by canto, as a great theatre of cruelty. As such,
it raises at the same time the question: how much violence can a text
support? The answer is to be sought in the art of telling that interrupts
the description of the battle again and again by episodes set in trans-
verse to the otherwise pervasive violence. Not only does this break up
the linearity of the narrative, but it disperses the tension and brutality
of war by the insertion of stories of love, loyalty, and caring sentiment
as if to make the point that there is more to humanity than just the
power to kill. A lateral operation, it is a strategy used to mobilize the
past in this drama as a critical brake on the mad rush of a dark and
fearful present.

Copyright © 2008 Ranajit Guha. First published as Foreword to the
Mahabharata , Book Six , Bhisma , Volume One , including the Bhagavad Gita in
Context , translated by Alex Cherniak (New York: New York University Press,
2008).

Foreword to the * Gita

535

However, dispersal is not enough, by itself, for the containment of
violence. Textual control has therefore to match it by displacement in
a vertical intervention to move the narrative from one level to another
in order to make room for reflections on aspects of the human con-
dition deeper than the excitement of the day. Of the many discourses
introduced for this purpose it is the ‘Bhagavad Gita' (‘Gita) that
interests us most in this context. It is generally regarded as a philosophical
text of foundational importance. That in turn prompts the question
why it has been necessary to site it in this particular book and not in
some other.

The answer is not hard to find if it is noticed that a displacement
occurred just as the hostilities were about to begin. Bhishma, the
commander of the Kauravas, had already put his troops on alert by a
last-minute blast on his conch; on the Pandavas’ side, Krishna respon-
ded by a counter-blast and Arjuna took up his bow to indicate that
the battle was on. Yet what had seemed so imminent was brought to
a screeching halt precisely at this moment. The tension that had
been building up eased to let deliberation and argument take over. For
Arjuna, as he surveyed the array of opposing forces, was suddenly
seized by conscience and declared to his mentor Krishna that he would
not fight. What was at issue in the ensuing argument between the two
was primarily about the right and wrong of fighting ones own kins-
men. The story had obviously shifted to the ethical plane.

The development of the plot needed this shift. For the Kauravas’
bid for power rested critically on Bhishmas support and he had to be
brought down if the story were to proceed. But that was a feat beyond
anyone on the Pandavas’ side other than Arjuna who alone might to
some extent — if not flatly — match the old man, a veteran of many a
war, in martial skill and courage. But just as he heard the call to take
up arms the young hero was stricken by conscience and paralysed by
indecision on a crucial question of choice between competing claims
on his sense of duty. It took Krishna all of seven hundred verses to
answer Arjunas doubts and make him change his mind. Such was the
measure of this dilemma. Clearly it had its source in a mundane human
actuality and not in divine will or metaphysical speculation. Thus the
‘Gita , child of a particular experience and its history, is in the first
place an integral part of the chronicle of a feud over property between

536 The Small Voice of History

rival factions of a clan, and philosophy steps in, after the event, to
construct it into an edifice of universal morality.

Yet that construction, even when shorn of universality, is not al-
together without relevance. For it addresses some of the common
confusions between ends and means so familiar in everyday life. Its
universalist pretension is just a mythic conceit thanks to which a village
dispure has been rhetorically blown up into subcontinental proportions.
Nonetheless, it does make the point that violence helps to elucidate
moral dilemmas. Quite a few of these would punctuate the course of
the war implicating both Krishna and Bhishma and show how both
had occasionally proved irresolute or opportunist in the face of crisis.
Arjunas loss of nerve, triggered by the imminence of battle, was only
the first of many instances that litter the text and subsequent books as
well, with questions asked and left unanswered.

However, Krishna’s answer to Arjuna on this occasion has obviously
stood the test of time. We need no presumption of an eternal verity or
the sanctity of a divine pronouncement to explain it. One can under-
stand it amply in terms of the relativity of moral judgement in lived
experience. So powerful and pervasive is such understanding that the
‘Gita’ has been appropriated by popular common sense as a guide for
everyday social intercourse, leaving it to the pandits and their com-
mentators to sort out the knots in the textual tangle. These are legion.
Since the first known commentary, dating back possibly to the ninth
century CE, interpretation has been pulled in many directions by rival
schools of faith and sometimes by differing points of view even within
the same sect. This has earned for the ‘Gita the dubious distinction of
being infinitely adaptable.

Such a judgement is not altogether baseless. For evidence one has
to turn to the fierce and irreconcilable dispute over the ‘Gita’ between
the followers of Shankara and Ramanuja, the two great proponents of
the Vedanta system. Typically this doctrinal conflict provides an ins-
tance of the eclectic drift in many of these interpretations. Ramanuja,
as staunch as Shankara in his adherence to knowledge {jnana ) as the
appropriate life path ( marga ), visibly inclines in favour of devotion
(i bhakti{ ) in his reading of the text. So does J naneshvar in his thirteenth-
century Marathi work. Gandhi, nearer our time, would bend over
backwards to make a modified notion of karma or action an integral
part of his view of the ‘Gita’ as a dissertation on bhakti. Between these

Foreword to the 'Gita

537

two there have been many commentators who have freely moved in the
three realms of knowledge, action, and devotion, changing from one
path to another and adjusting their primary affiliation to one or both
of the other two.

Whatever the purists may think of it, accommodation of this sort
has done nothing but good to Indian culture. For there can be no
doubt that the eclectic tendency to identify the discourse with any
particular dogma has saved it from the cruel indignity of being pen-
sioned off as holy and useless. Historically, that has been the fate of
many a canonical shastric text. The ‘Gita, by contrast, has lived on re-
newing itself as an ethical statement that has not lost its relevance yet.
Amenable to all systems but hostage to none, it has merged in regional
and local vernacular traditions throughout the land. Rural and subur-
ban forms of communication such as Gita-patha (literally, Gita-
reading) gatherings have facilitated this process, and it reaches out to
the common folk in the humblest villages and townships as a familiar
sort of entertainment mixing recital and commentary with storytelling
and music. Ethics displaced thus from the sombre puranic theatre of
war has been adapted by popular theatre as the stuff of everyday moral
conduct. If the ‘Gita loses some of its metaphysical gloss in this
translation that is amply compensated by what it gains in the process
of being opened up.

An equally emphatic testimony to the dynamism of such adaptability
comes from the history of Indian nationalism. Each of its three great
leaders, Tilak, Aurobindo, and Gandhi, who helped to transform it
from its anemic beginning as a demonstration of loyalty to the British
Raj into a mighty anti-imperialist mass movement, wrote commentaries
on the ‘Gita*. This is a remarkable fact that highlights the import-
ance of the text as a philosophy of self-questioning. For, to ask, as
Arjuna does, what his duty should be under the given circumstances,
is indeed to echo Everyman’s dilemma in the face of any difficult choice
and its metonymies — ‘What should I do now?’, ‘What am I to do with
my life?’, ‘Who am I?’

Krishna, in his answer, defines duty rather narrowly in terms of
caste imperatives. However, the elitist bias of that advice could hardly
stand up to the challenge of an emergent nationalism poised for a mas-
sive expansion. The mobilization of an entire people on what was to
shape up as the liberal-democratic agenda of a national movement was

538

The Small Voice of History

incompatible with the rigidity of caste hierarchy. It needed the much
more inclusive and open framework of the nation subsuming all other
denominations so that nationalism could act as an integral element of
selfhood. Duty to the nation, or desh-seva (lit. service to the country)
had, therefore, to come before any duty predicated on caste.

This momentous development that extended the idea of the self
beyond prescriptive caste identity is yet another instance of the buoy-
ancy of the ‘Gita’. It speaks of its remarkable ability to break out of the
mould of its original design and adjust to the ethical and intellectual
needs of the people at a critical turn in its history. A great survivor, it
has added thus both to its own relevance for our time and to that of the
book of ‘Bhishma*.

Coping with the Excess of History

C an we write history?' With these inaugural words the theme

I of the Meiji Gakuin University workshop on Asian histories

\^J has been put under what seems to me a sign of anxiety. It is
as if historiography has been seized by a sense of its own inadequacy.
This indicates, among other things, that the three-hundred-year-old
authority of the established historiographies is no longer beyond
doubt. The self-doubt of those who practise and propagate these in
the academy must be commended as a healthy scepticism. I am not
sure, however, that its source lies, as suggested, in a crude variety of
nationalism and/or a vaguely defined irritant called postmodernism.
To find out where the sense of inadequacy comes from I would rather
start with an inquiry into the conditions that make it possible for the
lead question to be asked at all. But before I proceed, I should like to
make it clear that I have no claim to speak on behalf of the W in that
question. I shall speak only for myself as one among many students of
South Asian history basing what I have to present for fact and argu-
ment entirely on the Indian experience under colonial rule.

Let me start then with some observations on a familiar and mo-
mentous development, namely, the post-War upsurge of interest in
the Asian pasts. This has led to a spectacular increase in research and
writings on the histories of this region. Within the relatively short
period of less than six decades this field of studies has expanded on

540

The Small Voice of History

quite an unprecedented scale. It is a many-sided expansion that is still
going on. A number of forces have been at work in it, bur it is de-
colonization which, more than anything else, helped to promote
academic interest in Asian history after the war. Colonialism had
meant, in this part of the world, the expropriation of the pasts of the
subject populations by their alien rulers In South Asia this was visible
both in the policies of the Raj and its administrative practices. Here a
land of subcontinental cultures, highly sensitive and proud of their
pasts, was conquered and occupied by Britain not only as an ambitious
imperial power, but also as one that had successfully matched its
national-historical self-consciousness by what was, at the time, modern
Europe’s most advanced historiography. That historiography, used by
the regime systematically as an instrument of governance ranging from
public education to fiscal administration, achieved what could certainly
be one of the ulfimate rewards of any dominance, that is, the im-
position of the,dominant’s sense of the past on that of the dominated.
If that didn’t lead to a total extinction of the latter, it was only because
colonialism, as a dominance without hegemony, couldn’t fully penetrate
the civil society which provided at least some refuge for the indigenous
cultures. Still, the effect of nearly two centuries of British rule was
overpowering enough to merit characterization as a colonization of the
South Asian pasts.

One of the most noticeable consequences of the long British
occupation was to make the history of the subcontinent exceedingly
unattractive for those who were educated under the Raj. As one of
them I still remember the school manuals on what was called ‘British
Indian history’ in those days. I was introduced to these for the first time
at the age of twelve. Until then I had been too young to know what
boredom was. But here it was, the real thing and bucketfuls of it,
poured over me twice a week at 1 1 a.m., at the history lesson in Class
Eight. Thar the same past, so potent a soporific in its colonialist
version, should prove to be a stimulus for much exciting academic
work within the span of a lifetime, is a miracle for which all credit is
due to decolonization. It made the history of modern India interesting,
introducing new actors, events, and stories, and thus vastly extending
it in scope.

541

Coping with the Excess of History

The advent of Independence put an end to the authority of the
colonial state and undermined that of the concomitant historiography
as well. The new state, like the one it replaced, was keen to use the
Indian past as a foundational element of its power base. The time had
come for new historiographies to take over from the old. But here, as
in the geopolitical instance, transfer of power turned out to be no plain
sailing. The striving for a reappropriation of the past was resisted by
habits of mind formed under the cultural conditions of the Raj. The
outcome of that contest between colonialist historiography and its
alternatives is still undecided, which is not surprising in view of the
formidable coalition of political and intellectual interests in the
liberal-imperialist paradigm under challenge. Even then it is already
clear that the clash of ideas between these opposing forces has opened
up the past to an extent and in ways we have not seen before.

To what extent and in what ways may be gathered from a quick look
at some of the implications of decolonization for nationalism. Since
the middle of the nineteenth century the latter had been active as a
historicizing force. Working sometimes in alliance with the ruling
colonialist culture and sometimes in opposition, it promoted a sense
of the Indian past that was, on the whole, consistent with the secular
and liberal-democratic ideas which informed the freedom struggle at
its peak. Distinguished by its emphasis on the unity of India and the
syncretic aspects of the subcontinental cultures, it succeeded in
building up the image of a shared past that came to be known as our
past’ or our history’. Used as ideological staple in the anti-imperialist
mobilizations of the time, these phrases spoke of a historical conscious-
ness made all the more powerful by the mythic elements it had
absorbed in fairly large doses.

With such a record to show for it, it was no surprise that nationalism
emerged, after Independence, as the leading contender against colo-
nialist historiography. But it failed to impress in this role. For one
thing, it was undistinguishable from its rival in the liberal doctrines
common to them and the empirical method used by both for research
and writing. Both had been trained at the school of nineteenth-century
British historiography. The only thing that set them apart was the
politics of imperialism. However, as the empire dissolved to make

542

The Small Voice of History

room for the sovereign nation-state and the same nationalist leaders
who had packed it with the promise of goods they were now unable or
unwilling to deliver, a snarling discontent (about which more later)
began to question nationalist interpretations of the past in order to
understand why this should have happened.

Interrogated at the bar of public wrath no less than at academic
gatherings the nationalist constructions of our past* and our history
proved to be based on elitist assumptions about a spurious unity. It was
found out how the latter was used to mask deep structural divisions
within the civil society so that the underprivileged masses could be
mobilized in the freedom struggle led by the elite for its accession to
power in a postcolonial state. The critique of nationalist historiogra-
phy that developed in these circumstances has opened up the Indian
past to admit women, dalits, peasants, and the rest of the subaltern
populations as actors and protagonists in our history on a level with
the elite. It has already enriched our experience of the past by myriad
narratives told for the first time, and there’s more to come. What is no
less important is that this opening up has introduced in South Asian
studies new theories, new points of view, new narratologies, and a new
interdisciplinarity on a scale which, to speak for myself, was beyond
my dream twenty-five years ago.

This, in short, is the scale and quality of the expansion of South
Asian history that has occurred in the wake of decolonization. It is
worth keeping this in mind, for it helps to put our concern about
historiography in the perspective of Asia’s encounter with its destiny
in the post-War era. For the force of circumstance (with all the politi-
cal, economic, and intellectual, i.e. all material and spiritual factors
subsumed in that phrase) had assigned a fateful role to the past. With
the end of colonial rule in the region, it brought into view a largely
uncharted territory hitherto known more in outline than detail, like
empty spaces in some premodern maps of the world. Yet all routes to
the future lay through this dark continent. Consequently, every jour-
ney into the interior turned out to be an exercise in history; It lias been
rewarded, for its labours, with access to vast amounts of unexplored
information and has, in its turn, brought some of the hidden dimensions
of history to light, opening up entirely new vistas.

543

Coping with the Excess of History

If, for all chat, historical scholarship is still not happy about the
bounty it has been so providentially granted, how is one to explain this
discomfort? Should it be shrugged off as an embarrassment of riches
or regarded as the sign of some deep underlying difficulty? Doesn’t it
show that the winds of change have driven the ship of history too far
out into the sea of time and its crew of academic experts are finding it
hard to cope with the turbulence? Could it indeed be the case that we
have got too much of the past on our hands and don’t know quite how
to deal with it?

For an answer let us go back to that moment when Nietzsche identi-
fied a somewhat similar problem in contemporary German culture as
the oversaturation of an age with history' (N: 83). He was convinced
that this was the symptom of a spreading illness — a consuming fever
of history from which we are all suffering’ (N: 60). However, his
diagnosis has rather less to do with the pedagogic and institutional
aspects of historical discourse (though this is not entirely lacking) than
with a deep concern about ‘the uses and disadvantages of history for
life’, as witness the title of that well-known second essay in his Untimely
Meditations. 1 The insertion of life into the title here amounts to a pers-
pectival shift. It takes the problematic out of the groove of academic
thinking according to which history is what harvests the past for the
benefit of knowledge and the more it is garnered the better. But in
Nietzsches view, ‘knowledge presupposes life’ (N: 121) and history
has its uses for life only when it strikes the right balance between the
memorable and the forgettable components of the past. So delicate a
matching is, however, not to be taken for granted. History doesn’t
always deliver. A nation, like an individual, may end up with an over-
blown historical sense cultivated without restraint’ (N: 95) and made
into a ‘hypertrophied virtue’ no less harmful than any ‘hypertrophied
vice’ (N: 60). Far from being an advantage, this works against life as
an ‘affliction’ and a ‘malady’. Described by Nietzsche as the excess of
history’ (N: 120 et passim) , it stands for a debilitating imbalance in

1 ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’, in Friedrich Nietzsche,
Untimely Meditations, trans. R.J. Holingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1 983), pp. 57-1 23. References are by N and page number in the text.

544

The Small Voice of History

which the scale has been allowed to tip too far in favour of memory.
Put the other way round, history has degenerated under this condition
into the symptom of a grave impairment: the ability to forget, a faculty
which distinguishes man from other animals, has been seriously un-
dermined, if not lost altogether.

Excess of history, understood thus as excess of memory, is clearly a
symptom of the degenerating health of a culture, and Nietzsche uses
a large number of organicist metaphors to discuss the pathology. The
reader, loo, is led to look for parallelisms in clinical history. I, for my
part, am reminded of the man about whom the eminent neuropsycho-
logist A.R. Luria has so brilliantly written.2 The problem with his
patient, a professional mnemonist gifted with a vast memory, was that
he couldn't forget anything. Trapped in detail, he found it nearly
impossible to form an overall picture in his mind out of any text what-
soever— read or heard or otherwise perceived.

There were numerous details in the text, each or which gave rise to new
images that led him afield; further details produced still more details,
until his mind was a virtual chaos. (L: 55)

Clearly such a chaos goes against the very logic of memory's work for
most of us. ‘Many of us are anxious to find ways to improve our
memories’, says Luria: none of us have to deal with the problem of how
to forget. In [this] case, however, precisely the reverse was true. The big
question for him, and the most troublesome, was how he could learn
to forget’ (L: 55).

Translated in terms of historiography, this condition would indicate
a crippling malfunction in the historian’s craft. In this craft, digging
the past for data, however arduous and successful such excavation may
be, is always second in importance to the skill that goes into gathering
the results in a coherent account. Coherence demands selectivity
which, in its turn, is guided strictly by interpretation. To select implies,
of course, the choice of some parts of a given set of information in
preference to the rest, and correspondingly, to interpret is to valorize
only some of all possible meanings over others. In either case a part of

2 A.R. Luria, The Mind of a Mnemonist (H armondsworth: Penguin Books,
1975). References to this work are by L and page number in the text.

545

Coping with the Excess of History

the memory must be deleted whenever the historian is called upon to
represent the past in a manner that makes sense. Which is to say that
the health and performance of historiography, like those of the hapless
mnemonist, depend critically on its practitioners ability to forget.

As a pathology, the inability to forget has consequences which are
not without relevance for us. It generates whar psychologists call a
passive-receptive attitude that makes the patient rely too heavily on the
past. He seeks refuge there as an escape from the present and vegetate
In the case reported by Luria, the man who could not forget was,
by his own admission, content to wait indefinitely at the threshold of
something grand’ to happen to him any time soon (L: 117-18). The
oversaturation of his mind with memory was evidently a charter for
lack of action.

By contrast, as Nietzsche insists again and again, there is nothing
passive about forgetting. ‘Forgetfulness’, he writes, ‘is not just a vis
inertiae . . . but is rather an active ability to suppress, positive in the
strongest sense of the word?'3 It is, indeed, ‘essential to action of any
kind, just as not only light but darkness too is essential for the life of
everything organic’ (N: 62). To forget is, for him, nothing less than an
act of will. What connects willing to acting here is the locomotion of
desire towards its objective. This is a movement which is concerned
thus with going away from something in order to reach its destination.
A negativity oriented inexorably towards the positive, it is a force that
destroys as the very condition of a possibility to create. How it func-
tions creatively as the human faculty to forget and enables history to
shed excess in order to recover its health may be gathered by looking
at the South Asian scene again.

Since the end of British rule forgetfulness has progressively asserted
itself in this region in a wave of rethinking about the colonial past. I
have already touched upon some of its more salient aspects and a great
deal more could of course be said on the subject. Taken as a whole,
that is, as a process made up of many tendencies and crosscurrents, it
counts, for me, as a momentous and wide-ranging effort to breathe
new life into a dated and moribund historiography. I am aware that its

3 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. K. Anseli-Pearson,
trans. C. Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 38.

546

The Small Voice of History

significance is still not fully appreciated if only because the impulse,
in which it originated, is yet to reach its peak and some more time will
have to elapse before the development comes fully into perspective.
When it does so, it will be hard to deny it the recognition it deserves
as a massive displacement of large amounts of dead memory. A pile of
purely colonialist interpretations, the latter had dominated the study
of the South Asian past in all modes of teaching, learning, and research
for over a century. Promoted as a matter of policy by the agencies of
the colonial administration, it was indeed the normal science of hist-
ory in British India. However, its authority has been seriously under-
mined since the emergence of the subcontinental sovereign states. A
mighty revisionism powered by forgetfulness has to a large extent,
though not completely yet, shaken off the yoke of the imperial past.
The oldest of modern historiographies with the longest record of
service rendered to the largest of empires has retreated before a historic
act of will exercised by the subject populations.

But retreat is by no means the whole story. Forgetfulness has also
been the herald of a great transformation. It has not only removed a lot
of the worn-out colonialist junk, but has been discriminate enough to
combine what India had learnt from the West with a good deal of in-
novative thinking to prepare the ground for a historiography adequate
to the conditions in which the country found itself as the Raj made
room for swaraj (self-rule). A dead past has been replaced thus by one
that is invigorated, fertile, and youthful Which goes to show, among
other things, that forgetfulness is not just a mindless vandalism bent
on demolishing the past altogether. To the contrary, going by the South
Asian experience, it works as a regenerative force. For it disburdens
history of excess only in order to nurture what is still positive about it
and use it, together with new seedlings, to replant pasts laid fallow. As
such, it testifies in no uncertain terms to the empowering and creative
role of forgetfulness.

Decolonization of h istory on such a scale is no mean feat. But from
where does it get its energies and motivation? What is the souice uf
creativity in this act of will? Does ir lie in the expertise of scholars
and other custodians of the past? Does it derive, in other words, from
knowledge? The answer is *no\ Knowledge plays its part in this willing,
no doubt, but only as an auxiliary to life. This question has not been

547

Coping with the Excess of History

of much interest to academics so far as it concerns historiography, an
indifference that amounts, in effect, to masking a vital relationship.
For our part, let us try to understand its articulation in the Indian ins-
tance in the light of the rethinking mentioned above.

On its debut this insistence on rethinking made its mark at once as
a highly visible, because radical and iconoclastic, aspect of public dis-
content that was a distinctive feature of the post-Independence era.
This discontent has been studied at length by social scientists both in
the subcontinent and abroad. Economists, focused on the poverty and
material deprivation related to the phenomenon, have called it economic
discontent. In political science, it figures as a case of political discontent
issuing from the grievances of a newly enfranchised citizenry worried
about entitlements falling short of expectation. Sociology and social
anthropology have yet another name for it, that is, social discontent,
identified by conflictual response to long-standi ng hierarchical divisions
within the civil society under what was supposed to be a democracy.
Not only do these separate designations testify to the bunkered one-
sidedness of institutional learning somewhat analogous to the blind
mans description of the elephant once as hard and pointed, as he
touches the tusks, next as coarse and flat, as he feels the skin, and so
forth. More importantly, these stand for a measure of the inadequacy
of knowledge when it fails to acknowledge the primacy of life.

For discontent is, in essence, a condition of life. It is the privative
mode of that accord with our environment, that harmony in our being
with others in the world, which enables us to feel attuned to life. Cir-
cumstances were hardly conducive to such attunement during the
early years of the republic s career. Which is why a mighty critique
formed out of the disillusionment, suffering, strife and above all the
life-enhancing fight for sheer survival emerged from life itself as a
people s will to act. This was, for them, the only way to seek empower-
ment. As a nation, they had been striving towards self-determination
for decades. But when they thought they had arrived at last, it was only
to realize that accession to the new nation-state meant power mainly
for the elites with the rest of society still relatively powerless. In this
condition, they signalled by their discontent that the struggle for self-
determination had to go on and the critique of colonial rule develop
into a critique of the successor regime as well. The only contingent of

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The Small Voice of History

knowledge to pick up the critique for its theme was one that had little
to do with the academy. It was art as allied to life in literature, film,
theatre, and painting. Here discontent proved to be exceptionally fer-
tile in a creativity that answered the creative impulse of life.

Where, you may wonder, was historiography in all this? Plainly
speaking, nowhere yet, which was in sharp contrast to the reaction of
rhe social sciences noted above. The latter were distinguished in those
post-War years for their concern with the present. Focused almost
exclusively on the current and the immediate, they studied the dis-
content clinically so that the accuracy of diagnosis might serve policy
in its effort to cure it. It was a project in which all the disciplines worked
with a strong scientistic orientation that relied primarily on analysis,
measurement, quantification, and the formal construction of proof —
that is, on mathematization understood in the broad sense of the term.
There was no room here for history. It was in fact, anathema to most
of these self-styled sciences, and at least one of them, namely, mainstream
social anthropology of the Anglo-American school, made quite a name
for itself by its determination to keep history beyond its purview.

That was pushing forgetfulness too far no doubt. But it helps to
clarify the indifference of historiography as the converse burdened
with too much past. As a new recruit to the academic profession at that
time I remember quite well the upsurge in historical research which
began in the 1 950s and continued for the next two decades. The num-
ber of candidates for doctoral degrees was legion. The publication of
historical monographs and learned papers increased year by year. And
never before had the archives in India and abroad been so extensively
consulted for official and other records of the South Asian past. But the
more we delved and the larger the volume of documentation we gath-
ered, the more irrelevant and uninteresting became the products of our
scholarly labour. Shackled to a dead past, historiography had its
sensitivity dulled by the sheer weight of useless information and didn’t
know how to respond to the concerns of our time and the questions
they had thrown up. If the other social sciences had turned into mere
instrumental knowledge because of their exclusive concentration on a
present abstracted from the past, history on its part was reduced to a
pile of antiquarian erudition because of its failure to connect the past
to the present.

549

Coping with the Excess of History

But this connection couldn’t be indefin itely postponed. Life decided
the moment for history to wake up to the call of the present, ease off
the excess deposited by time, and move on to face up to the challenge
of will acting as discontent. Since the latter was nothing but the self-
assertion of life itself, the intervention couldn’t be more appropriate.
For this discontent originated in and owed its power to the confluence
of two generational life-streams. Representing the populations born
respectively before and after circa 1 947, both of these were fraught
with a serious disappointment with the present, but each in its own
way. The older men and women felt betrayed because the new nation-
state didn’t conform ro the image made up in anticipation by decades
of nationalist dreaming; the younger, because the republic failed to
deliver what they, its first-born citizens, had grown up to expect as their
rightful entitlements.

When the two streams converged, it was to turn into a highly
volatile frustration that soon caught fire. This was the signal, flashed
by life, to command historiography to step into the burning present.
For the latter demanded an answer why. What was there in the past,
in the traditions, in the phenomenon called nationalism, in the events
and deeds that gave the anti-colonial struggle its content, in the careers
of parties and individuals — all of which made the past whar it was —
what was there in all these to account for so cruel a present? There was
nothing indeed in the smug old scholarship that could cope with such
an insistent and bitter questioning articulated in the noisy concourse
of life well outside the padded chambers of learning. This is why the
work on the past in which knowledge followed the lead of life, Apollo
that of Dionysus, had to be a historiography charged with all the
tensions of the present even as it maintained a critical distance from
the latter. It had to be an exercise in critical history , as Nietzsche had
defined it.

But the present was by no means its only concern. Child of the
present, critical history bent backwards to retrieve the past so that it
could be made visible in the glow of current anxieties. However, it was
not nostalgia but ambition that had ignited these anxieties in the first
place. Indeed, what was at stake for the younger as well as the older
generations was possibility, the promise of what was yet to come. With
all their disillusionment — perhaps, because of it — they were focussed

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The Small Voice of History

boldly on the future and keen to understand the present in the light of
the past in order to move ahead. A twofold temporal movement with
the present bent back to harness the past and the past skipping the
present in its thrust towards the future, critical history, involved as it
was in the current predicament, didn’t allow itself to be swamped by
the latter. It was detached enough to keep its gaze firmly fixed on
possibility.

A critical history so full of turns and twists can never be free of
tension. Rocked by the instability of being in the present and yet
poised above it in order to keep looking ahead, it is a perfect recipe for
the kind of worry that would typically ask: ‘Can we deal with the past
at all in such times?’ Not an easy question to answer. For it tugs at the
very roots of out existence. To ask about the past is, indeed, to be con-
fronted at the deepest level with a having-been-ness that has gone into
the making of our own selves. It makes us ask how we related to our
own pasts to become what we are as individuals and members of
our own communities. To face up to such questioning about identity,
time, and the world, that is, nearly the entire range of our being, can
be daunting.

The difficulty is compounded by the ethical implications of for-
getting which, as we have seen, provides critical history with its dyna-
mics. Yet the dialectic of forgetting confronts historiography with an
acute problem of choice by requiring it to delete some of any given past
so that it can absorb the rest to its narratives. When old guidelines that
once regulated such choice by nationalist ideologies seem inadequate,
when new guidelines formulated to challenge liberal and rationalist
assumptions about the past seem less than convincing, it is precisely at
such moments that the historian is caught up in this dilemma. For the
selectivity that is essential to interpretation and integral to his craft
requires an agonizing discrimination between facts, hence values.

It is by engaging thus with some of the basic questions of existence
and ethics that critical history makes knowledge respond concretely
to the imperatives of life. By no means an easy deal to negotiate, it
is bound to run into trouble. However, it is worth bearing in mind
that our worry in this regard issues from hope rather than despair and
relates thus to anxiety. For the latter, even when it has the past for its
referent, is inexorably future-oriented. Faced with a problem, it sets

551

Coping with the Excess of History

about groping for a solution without being fully aware that it is doing
so. The solution it is looking for at any given time still lies ahead. In
other words, it is always looking for a change. ‘Can we write history?1
To ask this question is, therefore, to convert our anxiety about the
inadequacy of historiography into the energy of a forward-looking
drive to overcome it.

That drive is nothing but the impulse of life itself. The ship of
history, navigated by life, runs into turbulence from time to time, for
it tends to have too much loaded on board. But the effort to get rid of
what is stale and useless and continue on its voyage, with the remainder
supplemented by cargo picked up at new ports of call, is integral to its
movement. It teaches us thus how to strike the right balance and leads
us into untroubled waters. We are still going through the turbulence
that developed in the wake of decolonization. But I am confident that
it will not be long before we meet the halcyon wind and sail in calm
again — until, of course, the next turbulence.

PART V

Democracy Betrayed

Teen-Age Wage Slavery in India

C? I i hese tender novices blooming through their first negritude,
I the maternal washings not quite effaced from their cheeks —

JL such as come forth with the dawn or somewhat earlier . .
This is how Charles Lamb described the chimney-sweepers. But that
was long ago, in 1 823, and it is a little over a hundred years now that
child labour has been abolished in England.

But in what was called, until recently, the second city of the British
Empire — in the metropolis of Calcutta — an inspired Elia may find
similar themes for essays even today. Walking through ‘the dawn or
somewhat earlier, he would see numerous ‘innocent blanknesses* not
on ‘aerial ascents anticipating sunrise* — but going down the gaping
manholes, into gaseous pits to remove the accumulated filth of the city.

These are the municipality workers, many of them as young as 7 or
8 years of age. As every citizen knows, the number of such ‘tender novi-
ces’ employed formally or surreptitiously by the Calcutta Corporation
must be several hundred. And the biggest wonder is that among the
many municipal scandals of the city — splashed in big headlines and
discussed in noisy meetings — the employment of children for work in
foul underground drains, at the risk of their lives, is not regarded as a
matter of common shame.

The existence of child labour on a large scale in Indian industries
has been admitted on all sides. As many as three acts were passed be-
tween 1 933 and 1 939 banning this practice. But legalities are regarded
with scant respect.

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The Small Voice of History

In almost every report published recently by the Government of
India there are findings to prove the existence of widespread child
labour all over the country. In the tea, coffee, rubber, mica, and coir
industries alone the total number of child workers is 145,136. Con-
sidering that this estimate is based on evidence supplied by employers
themselves, the real extent of employment may be even greater. There
are many other industries for which figures are not given, although the
employment of children in open or illegal ways is frankly admitted.

In the words of the main Report of the Labour Investigation Com-
mittee, Government of India:

In mica-splitting, shellac, bidi-making, carpet weaving, glass and
other small scale industries, whether covered by the Factories Act or by
the Employment of Children Act, child labour is still largely employed.
In the match industry, especially in South India and in the cement in-
dustry in Rajputana also child labour is employed to a large extent. In
the States, the situation is probably worse. For example, we found little
girls employed in the Cochin state, in the spinning section of the cot-
ton textile industry, while in Kashmir children of 5 or 6 years work in
carpet weaving, (pp. 380-1)

Why do they employ children even when there is chronic unemp-
loyment among adults? Greed for profit is the only answer. For such
labour is cheap and can be easily exploited. Let us take the mica in-
dustry. The total number of children in mica mines and factories all
over India is, according to official statistics, 13,455.

In the mica mine it is common experience to see children going
down to tackle heavy jobs underground. After holes have been blasted
in the mine with the help of explosives, little Santhal kids are sent down
into the pits to fill buckets with muck and mica blocks, and relay up
the heavy load sitting precariously on every third rung of wooden
ladders.

In a mica factory children are employed in most of the occupations.
In four of the most important jobs connected with mica manufacture,
namely, sickle-dressing, splitting, screening, and wrapper-making, the
proportion of child workers to adults is 1 :3, and it is extremely pro-
fitable for the owners to have it so. For inferior quality mica can be
easily handled by children and the savings thereby made in labour-
costs more than balance the damage done to mica pieces by a little

557

Teen-Age Wage Slavery in India

careless tackling. The comparative wage data for children and adults
would show this. In mica-cutting a child gets 3 annas a day as against
9 annas for adults, and an overall comparison shows that children get
only 33V3 to 662/3 per cent for similar occupations vis-h-vis adults. It
is therefore the most sordid hypocrisy when mica millionaires say that
they employ children for sheer love for the workers themselves.

The biggest concentration of child labour, as everybody knows, is
in the plantations — tea, rubber, and coffee. And in 1943-4 the total
number of child workers in Assam and Bengal gardens alone (leaving
aside South India) was 120,959.

In the plantations, as the Rege Committee report says, ‘the family,
rather than the individual is the unit of recruitment.’ All the adult
members and the older children of the family work on the plantations.
This means the entire family of workers is made to work as slave labour
for the benefit of tea, coffee, and rubber kings.

And not merely the older children’. In the Darjeeling and Dooars
gardens children as young as 3—4 years begin to help their mothers
in plucking, and at the initial stage the leaves often go into the same
basket — so that the mother alone is paid for the work of both. After
a while they themselves start earning piece-rates on odd jobs such as
carrying manure and hand- forking. And in the Assam gardens when
a child reaches the status of a full-fledged worker, employed on res-
pectable jobs such as plucking or pruning, his highest daily earnings
come to 4 annas a day.

One wonders why the volume of child labour in tea plantations
should go on increasing while in almost all other industries there is a
gradual decline. The number of children on labour books in the Assam
gardens in 1935-6 was 78,418, while the corresponding figure for
1943-4 was 86,520. The reason behind this increase is that while in
other industries there are laws protecting children from employment,
in plantations no law is strong enough to stop the hand of exploitation.

The labour investigation committee admits with shame that ‘the
plantation labour, except factory labour, does not come under any pro-
tective legislation.’ Again, the ‘Whitley Commission recommend-
ed that employment of children on plantations before the age of ten
should be prohibited by law, but this recommendation has not been
implemented.’

What is it that enables these planters to go on defying the hand of

558

The Small Voice of History

law and even preventing any attempts at legislation against child labour?
For an answer, one has to realize the tremendous economic power con-
centrated in the hands of these tea-kings who are the world’s biggest
producers and suppliers. In 1 937-8 they exported tea worth Rs 24.39
crores, while the latest available figures — for 1942-3 — show a rise up
to Rs. 31 .64 crores. The value of tea shares per Rs 100 of joint stock
capital in the Calcutta Share Market has been going up — Rs 202 in
1 92 1 , Rs 248 in 1 942, Rs 393 the next year, and so on. Add to this the
fact that while there is only one foreign tea company to every three
India-owned — three-fourths of the entire capital invested is in the
hands of British planters — and it becomes clear how strong the foreign
monopoly control over our tea industry is. After all this, should any-
body wonder why laws for protection of native* workers* children do
not work on the estates of white tea-kings?

According to the Rege Comm ittee Report one of the main arguments
of mica owners in justification of child labour is ‘that since children
cannot be provided with education it is better to make them learn the
trade than let them waste their time.*

Indeed, only one out of the many mica owners visited by the
commission had any kind of school for workers’ children. Consider-
ing that the mica industrialists hold a world monopoly and that their
annual export exceeds Rs 212 crores, one does not understand why
children cannot be provided with education* — if the reason implied
is financial.

The planters, however, are quite candid in their statement. Without
theorizing about children ‘learning their trade’, and so on, they openly
assert that education of children will deplete the source of labour
for plantations.* And in order to justify their deliberate hold-up of
primary education, the Indian Tea Association complains, ‘Primary
schools exist on the great majority of gardens, but it must be admitted
frankly that attendance is meagre.*

As for the great majority of gardens having primary school here are
the facts. In Assam only 392 out of 1 1 28 estates have schools, while the
total number of children living on these estates is 572,35 1 . This means
that there is only one school for 1 50 children in one out of every three
estates. Anyone who has been to the Assam tea gardens knows how
absurd such an arrangement is. For the average size of a plantation is

559

Teen-Age Wage Slavery in India

4 to 5 square miles and little kids cannot be expected to cover miles of
jungle tract every day just in order to attend school. Attendance in such
schools cannot obviously be very high.

So much for the extent of educational facilities they actually pro-
vide, while the condition of existing schools may be judged best from
the words of Mr D.V. Rege, head of the Government Labour Investi-
gation Committee: ‘Very often the schools in the estates are only small
sheds where one teacher instructs children of all ages and of all stand-
ards. In many cases the school shed was one end of the muster-shed,
the other end being used as a creche. In the creche the children cry and
the women in charge swing the cradle and sing rustic lullabies. A few
feet apart, the teacher teaches a group of babbling children aged from
4 to 12. How, under these circumstances, can education be imparted
or imbibed is difficult to understand.’

The educational policy of child employers is thus the height of
hypocrisy. In order to force children to work, they keep the adult work-
er’s wages below the minimum, they provide schools which are care-
fully designed to suppress any desire to learn, and in most cases they
provide no schools at all

The dumb little ones who are thus prematurely harnessed to the
machine of greed demand with the revolutionary student movement
of India immediate action to stop the exploitation of child labour in
any form and in any industry. India’s first new legislature has already
met. Let there be enactments banning altogether this crime against
humanity and life itself.

Let the baby-killers of the mines and plantations be kicked out,
their estates confiscated and nationalised so that adult workers may get
a fair living wage and children do not have to go down into pits for 4
annas a day. Let the Nehru government come out with a plan for free
compulsory education of working class children, and our youth will
volunteer as teachers, if need be, to implement it. Let there be no more
profits squeezed out of infant frames.

On Torture and Culture

The confrontation between the revolutionaries and the guardians
of law and order has reached a significant stage. The sympath-
izers and activists of the CPI (ML) are being subjected to a
variety of tortures in police custody. Calcutta is slowly waking up to
the fact, although this is not an entirely new development. Already last
summer a sensitive and confirmed anti-Communist had taken note of
this in the pages of a journal firmly committed to the Establishment.
We quote in extenso from Rupadarsis column in Desk of May 30,
1 970, because it is representative both as a record of facts and as a point
of view.

Recently I happened to meet two young Naxalites just released on bail.
One of them is 19 years of age . . . and the other 21 . . . They both
have extremely innocent looks, and rht»y a re highly resolute in character,
idealistic and courteous.

Both said that they had become Naxalites merely by reading Desha -
brati ... I have no reason to disbelieve them on this count.

One of them was taken away from home at about 2-30 or 8 a.m.
by the police during a raid earlier this month. T he police had no war-
rant for his arrest, and had no specific charges to show against him.
The other alleged that some CPM boys in his college had tipped off
the police to arrest him.

They both were lodged in police lock-ups in the local thana , at
Lalbazar and in jail for fifteen days before being released on bail.

On Torture and Culture

561

They said that although there was no specific charge against them,
it is only because they read and kept Deshabrati — the police search in
their houses had yielded nothing but bundles of this journal — and
because they subscribed, out of idealism, to the thoughts of MaoTse-
tung, that they were put to severe torture at the police station at Lal-
bazar, and at the Lord Sinha Road and Gokhale Road police bureaux.
One of them said that when Debi Roy, a chief of the detective depart-
ment, failed to make him yield any ‘information through bastinado
himself, he got a junior officer to beat him up further. And since the
boy knew nothing, he had no information to yield. Under the direction
of Arun Mukherji, the new SB boss, one of these boys was suspended
by handcuffs from the ceiling for three hours and ruthlessly beaten up
on the soles of his feet until he lost consciousness — all in order to ex-
tract a confession. They also gave him electric shocks. In addition to
this, in order to make them confess, they were, during the first few
nights, roused from sleep from time to time and abused in the most
obscene language . . . They were not maltreated during their stay in
the jail lock-up. There they had an opportunity to meet many other
Naxalites, and talking about their mutual experiences, they came to
learn a lot more about police repression. A young boy told them that
the police had forced an iron rod into his anus, and an elderly chemist
displayed cigarerte burns made by the police on his body.

In the six months since this wa^ written, a great deal more has been
beard about atrocities of a similar or even more outrageous sort.1
Although most of the big ‘national’ dailies have not yet made up their
mind about treating such information as news’, some of the more
Dutspoken periodicals are already shrieking in agony. See, for instance,
the extracts quoted from Darpan in Frontier of November 14, 1970.
Besides, one has simply to ask the boy next door in almost any para
af Calcutta, and he will produce oral — and if one has the stomach
For it — visual evidence of broken wrists, roasted skin, mangled anus,
cruised testicles — his own or those of his friends. .

Yet, as the columnist in Desk points out, public reaction to such
itrocities has been one of near indifference: ‘I see nothing but an amaz-
ing silence all around! ... At a time when we ought to step forward
without fear, how is it that we are acting as passive and mute onlookers?*

1 This article was written in the first week of December 1970.

562 The Small Voice of History

The onlookers days of innocence are, however, strictly numbered.
When a regime takes to the use of torture as a part of its normal routine
of political pacification’, it must end up by producing a high incidence
of mental disorder both among the torturers and the tortured. The
Algerian war has left us with ample evidence on this point. This is re-
corded in the writings of Frantz Fanon who, as a professional psychiatr-
ist, had an opportunity to study the problem from both the warring
sides. His work, The Wretched of the Earth (Penguin, 1967) devotes a
cruel and for us highly instructive chapter to a discussion of ‘reactionary
psychoses which, according to Fanon, resulted directly from ‘the
bloodthirsty and pitiless atmosphere, the generalization of inhuman
practices characteristic of that conflict. The process, it appears from
this account, spares the personality of neither the torturer nor the
tortured.

Broken Minds: The Tortured

To take up the victims first, Fanon discusses a large number of patients
suffering from affective-intellectual ‘modifications and mental disorders’
during and after torture, and shows how a correspondence exists be-
tween the characteristic morbidity groups and the different methods
of torture employed.

His first category of tortures is particularly interesting for the
resemblance they bear to Lalbazar’s alleged practices. These are the so-
called preventive tortures designed to make the prisoner talk. ‘The
principle that over and above a certain threshold pain becomes intoler-
able, takes on here singular importance. The aim is to arrive as quickly
as possible at that threshold.’ The methods include beating up by
several policemen at the same time and from all directions; skin burnt
by lighted cigarettes; injection of water by the mouth accompanied by
an enema of soapy water given at high pressure; introduction of a bot-
tle into the anus; forcing the prisoner to remain standing or kneeling
in physically the most painful postures for hours without the slightest
movement, every movement being punished with severe truncheon
blows.

The psychiatric symptoms exhibited by the victims of such tortures
include (a) agitated nervous depressions, (b) mental anorexia — loss of

On Torture and Culture 563

appetite arising from mental causes, and (c) motor instability expressed
in a total inability to keep still.

A second category relates to the use of electricity. Here again we find
our guardians of law and order emulating the French colonialists. As
Darpan writing about Lalbazars anti-Naxal techniques reported:
‘Sometimes the human beasts strip people and make them sit on light-
ed heaters. The lower limbs of Sahadeb, of Kasba, have been scorched
after he was made to sit on a lighted heater (quoted in Frontier p
November 14, 1970).

Fanons patients who had been tortured by electricity were found to
be suffering from electricity phobia. In other words, the victims felt
pins and needles throughout their bodies, their hands seemed to be
torn off, their heads seemed to be bursting, and their tongues felt as if
they were being swallowed. They suffered from inertia, a general sense
of disorientation and drift. They would refuse to come into physical
contact with any electrical appliance like a switch, a telephone, or a
radio, making it ‘completely impossible for the doctor to even mention
the eventual possibility of electric shock treatment/

In addition to these the author discusses two other methods of
torture to which his patients had been subjected, namely, brain-wash-
ing and intravenous injections of Pentothai, the so-called ‘truth
serum’. We have no evidence yet whether official torture in West
Bengal or elsewhere in India has yet reached such heights of sophisti-
cation. But it might do so in due course, and the reader could arm
himselfin advance by looking up Fanon on the psychiatric consequences
of these methods. For the way the regime and its protectors have
undertaken to bring back ‘a climate of sanity* in West Bengal might
end up by generating mental disorder on an unprecedented scale.
The first casualties are already with us. To quote from Darpan again:
‘Many of the arrested have gone mad . . . for instance, Mihir Sarkar or
Kelebabu of Sainthia. Thanks to repeated electric shocks, his mind
does not function properly; he faints off and on, gets excited at the
most ordinary conversation, and takes everyone for a Detective De-
partment man and becomes delirious’ {Frontier, November 14, 1 970).

It s time that the liberal onlooker started pondering over the price
he may have to pay for passivity. He may keep looking on or away at

564

The Small Voice of History

the risk of being condemned to live with broken minds and broken
bodies in every street and most homes. His days of innocence are
indeed numbered.

Broken Minds: The Torturers

Even more ominous, perhaps, is the prospect of living in a police state
where torture has become habitual with the custodians of the law.
For torture, in these circumstances, tends to be compulsive with the
torturer. He becomes a prisoner of his habit and his violence remains
no longer limited to the officially approved victims. The psycho-
tic process is, of course, aided by social and cultural inducements.
A torturer is rewarded well by the regime for his success in eliciting
information from his prisoner. Torture therefore becomes competitive
like any other ‘normal’ job or profession. And in order to do this job
well and deserve his rewards, the torturer must have faith in his mis-
sion: his cultural identification with his superiors point of view must
be altogether complete. As one of Fanoris patients, a European police
inspector involved in interrogating and torturing Algerian patriots,
put it:

The fact is, nowadays we have to work like troopers . . . Those genrle-
men in the government say there’s no war in Algeria and that the arm
of law, thats to say the police, ought to restore order. But there is a war
going in Algeria, and when they wake up to it, it’ll be too late. The
thing that kills me most is the torture . . . Sometimes I torture people
for ten hours at a stretch.

. . . It’s very tiring . . . It’s true we take it in turns, but the question
is to know when to let the next chap have a go. Each one thinks he’s
going to get the information at any minute and takes good care not to
let the bird go to the next chap after he’s softenedhim up nicely, when
of course the other chap would get the honour and glory of it . . . Our
problem is as follows: are you able to make this fellow talk ? It s a ques-
tion of personal success. You see, you’re competing with the others . . .

By the time this policeman came to see the doctor, he was already in
an advanced psychotic state. He smoked a lot — five packets of ciga-
rettes a day, lost his appetite, slept badly, and had frequent nightmares.
He hated noise. At home he wanted to beat up everybody all the time.

On Torture and Culture

565

It became a habit with him to hit his children, one of them a mere baby.
Once, as his wife criticized him for this, he threw himself upon her,
beat her up savagely and tied her to a chair. He couldn’t stand being
contradicted:

. . . as soon as someone goes against me I want to hit him. Even outside
my job, I feel I want to settle the fellows who get in my way, even for
nothing at all. Look here, for example, suppose I go to the kiosk to
buy papers. There’s a lot of people. Of course, you have to wait. I hold
out my hand ... to take my papers. Someone in the queue gives me
a challenging look and says, ‘Wait your turn.’ Well, I feel I want to beat
him up and say to myself, ‘If I had you for a few hours my fine fellow
you wouldn’t look so clever afterwards.’

The police inspector was clearly in the process of turning into a sadist.
Trapped, professionally as well as culturally, in his calling, he ended up
by asking the psychiatrist ‘to help him to go on torturing Algerian
patriots without any prickings of conscience, without any behaviour
problems and with complete equanimity.’ Thus, concludes Fanon, ‘we
find ourselves in the presence of a coherent system which leaves
nothing intact. The executioner who loves birds and enjoys the peace
of listening to a symphony or a sonata is simply one stage in the
process. Farther on in it we may well find a whole existence which
enters into complete and absolute sadism.’

For all who care it is time to wake up to the fact that, so far as poli-
tical torture is concerned, we already have a bit of Algeria in West
Bengal. Between an enlightened’ police chief, a patron of the arts, who
is alleged to have drawn up a list of revolutionaries in need of instant
liquidation and his subordinates getting on with torture as a quotidian
aspect of their duty, we have an army of potential sadists acting as our
protectors. It may not be long before these sadists start overreacting.
The longer they are allowed to go on, the more compulsive they are
likely to be in their urge to maim and to kill. The onlooker will get hurt
simply because he might happen to be ahead of the torturer in a queue.

Our emphasis so far has been on broken minds rather than broken
limbs. For it is only by recognizing psychosis as one of its characteristic
products that we come to acknowledge torture for what it really is —
that is, a cultural fact.

566

The Small Voice of History

A Fact of Culture

For there is no class or combination of classes that can keep itself
in power without cultural coercion. In the halcyon days of class rule
over an oppressed majority of the people, such normal’ institutional
means of mind-bending as schools, universities, ashrams, mass media,
etc. serve the purpose. But as the class struggle gains in intensity and
official violence starts meeting with revolutionary violence, the regime
in its desperation gets energized on all fronts: the innocuous const-
able on the beat is replaced by paramilitary forces or regular units of
the army; parliamentary procedures and constitutional myths are set
aside to make room for ‘preventive detention and other explicit forms
of terror; and following the logic of these developments, and as a neces-
sary complement to these, the arsenal of official culture is replaced by
the regimes brahmaastra , its ultimate weapon of persuasion, n£ft|fly,
TORTURE.

Nothing illustrates this procedure better than what’s going on in
West Bengal today. For a large section of the youth the normal’ insti-
tutions of a comprador culture — schools, colleges, and universities —
and their operational methods — courses, lessons, examinations,
etc. — have all become obsolete. These young people are refusing to
have their minds bent and the old culture forced down their throat. As
a result, the purveyors of this culture have started handing these insti-
tutions over to the purveyors of official violence. The Central Reserve
Police (CRP) takes over Jadavpur University. When the mind-bending
operations in the classroom meet with resistance, the Police Commis-
sioner is asked to help the process of learning with torture, the mind-
bending operation Lalbazar specializes in.

Lenin on Two Methods

Such cooperation between torturers and educators need not surprise
us. They stand, respectively, for the sharps and flats of our culture, and
neither taken alone would make the music. Together, they represent
that complementarity which Lenin wrote about in 1914.

In all advanced countries throughout the world, the bourgeoisie re-
sorts to two methods in its struggle against the working-class movement

On Torture and Culture

567

and the workers1 parties. One method is that of violence, persecution,
bans, and suppression. In its fundamentals, this is a feudal, medieval
method. Everywhere there are sections and groups of the bourgeoisie —
smaller in the advanced countries and larger in the backward ones —
which prefer these methods, and in certain highly critical moments in
the workers* struggle against wage-slavery, the entire bourgeoisie is
agreed on the employment of such methods. Historical examples of
such moments are provided by Chartism in England, and 1848 and
1871 in France.

The other method the bourgeoisie employs against the movement
is that of dividing the workers, disrupting their ranks, bribing individual
representatives or certain groups of the proletariat with the object of
winning them over to its side. These are not feudal but purely bourgeois
and modern methods, in keeping with the developed and civilized
cwstoms of capitalism, with the democratic system . . .

In keeping with Russia’s boundless backwardness, the feudal methods
of combating the working-class movement are appallingly predominant
in that country. After 1 905, however, considerable progress’ was to be
noted in the employment of liberal and democratic methods to fool
and corrupt the workers. Among the liberal methods* we have, for
example, the growth of nationalism, a stronger tendency to refurbish
and revive religion ‘for the people’ (both directly and indirectly in the
form of developing idealistic Kantian and Machist philosophy), the
‘successes’ of bourgeois theories of political economy (combined with
the labour theory of value, or substituted for it), etc., etc.

Among the democratic methods of fooling the workers and subject-
ing them to bourgeois ideology are the liquidationist-Narodnik-Cadet
varieties . . . (Collected Works, Moscow 1964, vol. 20, pp. 455-6)

It will be futile to seek in pre-revolutionary Russia a precise analogy of
India today. Parallelisms are of course there. One has merely to reflect
on the contemporary political scene in order to identify our own
‘liquidationist-Narodnik-Cadet varieties*. For the present purpose,
however, we shall take up only that aspect of Lenins statement which
relates to the coexistence of feudal and liberal elements in a culture.

Our educational system represents the liberal, velvet glove of our
culture. Fathered as it was by a colonial regime to serve primarily its
own needs, it is, twenty-three years after Independence, still not free

568

The Small Voice of History

from feudal dross: the values propagated and upheld by many of the
courses in the humanities and by the social relations within the
faculties and governing bodies of most institutions offer ample evidence
on this point. Yet, the system is on the whole bourgeois in its orient-
ation. Its aim is to inculcate among the youth rationalism, scepticism,
philosophical idealism, acquisitiveness, competitiveness, individualism,
and nationalism — that is, the classic range of bourgeois concepts,
values, and attitudes — through the characteristic manner of bourgeois
instruction based on empirical analysis and formal logic.

The youth are revolting against this system because it has no relev-
ance to their social existence. There is very little in the modes and re-
lations of production obtaining in our society that links up in any
meaningful way with the kind of education it offers. Worse, the liberal
trappings of the system are used by the regime and its servitors to cover
up the rottenness of the infrastructure itself. For the more advanced
contingents of our youth, therefore, the rejection of schools and
colleges constitutes a necessary part of their rejection of society itself.

The dominant cultures response to this has been to take off its
velvet glove and reveal the mailed fist. Liberalism has given way to the
other method of persuasion — the ‘feudal, medieval method’ of ‘violence,
persecution, bans and suppression’ mentioned by Lenin. Torture
represents this method in its most succinct and clearly defined form just
as in ancient and medieval battles a pair of warriors would detach
themselves from their respective sides and meet in single combat to
express, in its simplest form, the collective violence of the entire field.
This confrontation between the torturer and the tortured is feudal —
that is authoritarian and despotic — because, unlike what happens at
a seminar, there is no room here for the liberal manner of argument:
on the one hand’/ yet on the other’. The freedom of choice that the
persecutor can allow his victim must be strictly limited, and the terms
of his message are simply: either’/ or’ — either the torturer s point of
view or pain. Mr Debi Roy doesn’t waste his time sorting out masses
of alternatives.

As indicated in the extract above, feudal elements continue to
coexist with bourgeois elements even in a predominantly bourgeois
culture. There is no capitalist transformation of society that has ever
achieved or can achieve a total transformation of culture. Even the

On Torture and Culture

569

great bourgeois revolution of 1789 didn’t achieve this, and Marx
has left us with a classic exposition of the problem in The Eighteenth
Brumaire . Lenin himself offers nineteenth-century examples from
England and France, the most advanced capitalist countries of those
days. Closer to our own experience we have, in the age of imperialism —
the highest stage of capitalism, a wealth of evidence about the feudal
element showing up in and often dominating the culture of all capital-
ist regimes in their conflict with national minorities within their
visible or invisible empires.

It is, however, useful to remember that the relative share of the
feudal and bourgeois (i.e. liberal-democratic) component of a culture
has a fairly direct correlation with the level of socio-economic develop-
ment of the country concerned. As Lenin points out in generaliz-
ed terms as well as by a concrete observation about Russia before and
after 1 905, the more retarded a country is in capitalist development the
greater is the size of the bourgeoisie with a strong preference for feudal
methods in its struggle against the working class. India’s ‘boundless
backwardness is a statistical and social fact that is beyond dispute. In
spite of a certain glitter of modernity among a minute section of the
elite, our culture is, on the whole, a dark mass of feudal and quasi-
feudal ideas, customs, rituals, habits, and interpersonal relationships.
It is only to be expected, therefore, that the regime, its plans for the
promotion of private and public capitalism notwithstanding, would
at the drop of a cracker, rush to supplement — and eventually replace —
liberal techniques of persuasion by feudal ones.

Cutcherries Then and Now

The torturer has, thus, emerged from the lowest depths of our cultural
abyss. Like the coelacanth, he is the representative of a species that has
long been dead and is yet our contemporary. He is here, right here in
1970, flaunting his gruesome handiwork in every mahalla of India’s
most enlightened city to remind us, in no uncertain terms, that our
present is merely a diachronic notion having little to do with our so-
cial reality today and that we, in fact, continue to live in our past. A
comparison between Lalbazar s methods and those commonly practised
in our zamindari cutcherries in the nineteenth century would make
this clear.

570 The Small Voice of History

In an article, written in 1850, the Tattvabodhini Patrika presents
us with a select list of ‘the methods of physical punishment inflicted
on the peasants by landlords and darogas and their agents' (Benoy
Ghosh, Samayik Patrey Banglar Samajchitra , Vol. 2, Calcutta 1963,
pp. 122-3). Eighteen items are mentioned as follows. (1) They beat
up the peasant with cudgels and canes. (2) They beat him up with
shoes. (3) They force him to lie on his back and then pound his chest
by rolling a heavily weighted bamboo pole on it. (4) They polish his
nose and ears with sharp fragments of broken earthenware. (5) They
force him to rub his nose on the ground. (6) They tie his arms behind
his back and twist them by inserting a stick into the rope and turning
it round. (7) They apply itchy bichhuti herbs all over his body. (8) They
put his hands and feet in fetters. (9) They make him run around with
his hands holding on to his ears. ( 1 0) They press his hands in a kata —
a pincer-like instrument of torture made of two tough pieces of split
bamboos tied together at one end. (11) In summer they make him
stand astride in the sun with his legs set far apart on a brick platform
and his hands loaded with heavy slags of brick. (12) In winter they
sprinkle cold water over him or immerse him in water. (13) They put
him into a gunny bag which is then thrown into water. (14) They sus-
pend him by the branches of a tree. ( 1 5) In the months of Bhadra and
Aswin they would shut him up in a granary full of paddy seeds with the
grain stemming up in the seasonal heat and emitting a foul odour.
(16) He is imprisoned in a room used for storing lime. (17) They
would put him in a cell and starve him altogether or at best feed him
once a day on rice mixed with unhusked paddy. ( 1 8) They would keep
him captive in a room full of the fumes of roasted red chillies.

Compare this now with what goes on in our Police Commissioner's
cutcherry. Taking together the two accounts published in Desk and
Darpan , we have ten items of torture on our list. ( 1 ) At night the police
would rouse the prisoner from his sleep and shower abuses on him in
the most obscene language. (2) They would generally beat him up. (3)
They suspend him from the ceiling with handcuffs and hit him
without respite on the soles of his feet. (4) They try to cripple his hands
and fingers by blows. (5) They break his wrists. (6) They insert pins
under his nails. (7) They force rulers or thin iron rods into his anus.
(8) They burn his skin with lighted cigarette ends. (9) The strip him

On Torture and Culture 571

naked and force him to sit on a burning heater. ( ! 0) They give him
electric shocks.

The Modernity of Tradition

The two sets of torture differ in one significant respect. They differ in
technique. Over the 120 years that separate the agony of the Tattva-
bodhini Patrika from our own, the torturer has become more sophi-
sticated, modern, and efficient: one could almost say that he has
‘progressed* from a state of nature into the realm of art. The handcuff
has replaced the rustic twine, the iron rod in anus the bamboo kata, the
blazing heater the ordeal by sun, and the mind-destroying electric
shock the humiliation and defilement of a shoe-beating. The tortur-
ers ‘progress’, thus, is a perfect metaphor for our cultural landscape
with its pylons of modernity towering over a jungle of medievalism.

Nothing illustrates this more clearly than the fact that with all their
advanced* and sophisticated techniques Lalbazars methods bear a
close family resemblance to those of the zamindari cutcherry of the
mid-nineteenth century. Both sets of tortures are designed to reach and
cross that threshold beyond which, as Fanon says, pain becomes un-
bearable. In both cases the aim is to treat the captive body as a hostage
for the fugitive mind that refuses to bend to the captors bidding. More
importantly, the torturers of both groups are equally representative of
feudal authoritarianism. The minions of the law at Lalbazar, whose
ostensible function is to defend the liberties sanctioned by a liberal-
democratic constitution, do not offer their victims any greater freedom
of choice than did the neo-feudal barons of nineteenth-century Bengal
ruling by the sanction of the Permanent Settlement. ‘Such oppres-
sions*, the Tattvabodhini Patrika observed, ‘have become habitual
with these sinister, wicked landlords . . . They are convinced that their
writs are incontrovertible and that they themselves must preside over
‘all matters of life and death*. In much the same way Lalbazars writs
are not to be questioned. And now, with inexorable logic, Asia’s most
advertised parliamentary democracy has by the new Act armed a foul
gang of sadists, literally, with powers to ‘preside over all matters of life
and death*.

The promulgation of this new Rowlatt Act marks in our country the
approach of one of those ‘highly critical moments in the workers’

572

The Small Voice of History

struggle against wage-slavery’ when, as Lenin says, ‘the entire bour-
geoisie is agreed on the employment of such (feudal) methods.’ It will
not be true to say that all sections of our bourgeoisie have already
rallied behind such methods. They have not done so because the
struggle, in its intensity and amplitude, has not yet reached that critical
point which, in the sociology of Marxism-Leninism, is known as civil
war. Yet it is an index of a developing crisis that the revolutionary chal-
lenge to law and order has evoked a feudal response among large sec-
tions of our ruling classes all the way from monopolists to jotedars.

It is on behalf of the latter that the Bangla Congress leader, Mr Ajoy
Mukherjee, has come out with his recommendation of greater ‘freedom’
for the police to deal with the rebels. ‘If all attempts to persuade the
Naxalite youths to desist from their terroristic path fail’, he says, the
police should have the freedom to adopt firmer methods, including
firing’ ( Times of India, 20 November 1970). As an authentic sample
of the attitude of village tyrants whose interests it is the mission of
the Bangla Congress to uphold, there is nothing unusual about this
statement. What, however, is food for thought and highly relevant
to the present discussion is that Mr Mukherjee should in the same
speech seek in Gandhism a sanction for the use of counter-revolution-
ary violence. ‘Even Mahatma Gandhi has taught us, he says, to adopt
violent means to deal with violence in some cases. As a follower of
Gandhi I have no hesitation to call upon the people in the present
situation to meet arms with arms in self defence, if necessary’ (ibid.).
The ‘people’ who have responded to this Gandhian call with great en-
thusiam are, of course, the police. They are, as the voice of Lalbazar
wants us to believe, shooting merely in ‘self-defence’.

Gandhism and Violence

Now, it is no part of our argument to suggest that in justifying violence
in Gandhian terms Mr Mukherjee has been even remotely guilty of
misrepresenting the Mahatma’s teachings. On the contrary, he has
brought to light a significant aspect of Gandhism which, at less critical
moments, the apostles of non-violence try their best to hide from
public view. If anything, Mr Mukherjee has credited his master with
much less than is due. For Gandhi sanctioned violence not merely in
exceptional cases for the sake of an individuals self defence against an

On Torture and Culture 573

assailant, he very clearly spoke up in favour of the generalized violence
of the ruling class operating through the armed forces of the state.

Polemizing against an anarchist youth who had put to him some
tricky questions about violence, Gandhi wrote in an article in Young
India (7 May 1925):

I have not the capacity for preaching universal non-violence to the
country. I preach, therefore, non-violence restricted strictly to the pur-
pose of winning our freedom . . . Let him [the revolutionary] take
with me the one step to it (universal non-violence) which I see as clearly
as day-light, i.e., to win India’s freedom with strictly non-violent
means. And, then, under swaraj, you and I shall have a disciplined,
intelligent, educated police force that would keep order within and
fight raiders from without, if, by that time, I or someone else does
not show a better way of dealing with either. ( Collected Works> vol. 27,
pp. 51-2)

In less pious prose this means: do not resist imperialist violence
by popular violence so long as the British rule over India; after they
quit, build up the armed forces of the state as institutionalized violence
operating on behalf of the ruling classes. Here we are offered, in its
most lucid form, the very crux of comprador political philosophy:
non-violence with regard to imperialism, violence against the people.
No wonder, then, that the jotedais who, in West Bengal, represent the
fusion of pre-capitalist forms of rural exploitation inherited from the
days of the Raj with kulak characteristics acquired since swaraj, should
have found their champion in a Gandhian advocate of police violence.

Comprador Liberalism

Even more insidious perhaps is the attraction that this particular
philosophy has, in the present crisis, for the liberals. For lying at the
heart of this aspect of Gandhism are two fears — fear of the imperial-
ist oppressor and fear of the people — which our liberals used to
share equally with the feudal elements of our society under British rule.
Unlike its Western precursors liberalism here has never been the
historical outcome of a class struggle between the forces of capitalism
and feudalism fought, more or less, to a finish. We received our free-
dom on behalf of the ruling classes — port in a colonial cargo — and had
it administered to us through a variety of colonial institutions. We had

574

The Small Voice of History

liberal laws enacted for us by the Raj; it was the judicial and executive
apparatus of the regime which enforced these laws; our liberal values
and ideas have been the product of a Westernized system of education
planned, promoted, and fostered by the colonialists. Consequently,
our liberalism since its very inception in the early nineteenth century
grew up with distinctly collaborationist traits expressed, above all, in
a servile reliance on and unswerving faith in Law and Order — the most
formal expression of the culture of a ruling class . Gandhi spoke as a
protagonist precisely of this liberalism in advising the young anarchist
to lay down the arms the latter had taken up against the colonialists,
although the saint had no objection to an official armed force keep-
ing ‘order in a free India. With all its profession of non-violence as
a supreme dharma for an individual, the political philosophy of
Gandhism thus stands for the collective violence of the ruling class as
embodied in the armed forces of the state.

This, more than anything else, accounts for the ambiguity of the
liberal intelligentsia s assessment of Gandhi . The progressive1 professor
who condemns out of hand the blatantly obscurantist ingredients of
Gandhism would still, when the crunch comes, find it difficult to
denounce the doctrine in its entirety. For, what is left of it even after
excluding its feudal components is a pretty substantial lump of liberal
political philosophy pivoted upon the idea of sanctity of law and order.
The Law is thus the other holy cow of Gandhism, and taken together
the pair represents the complementarity of the feudal and bourgeois-
liberal elements in a comprador culture.

This is why in the current confrontation between the rebels and the
law, ones attitude to torture — that is, official violence expressed in its
most succinct form — is inextricably bound up with ones attitude to
Gandhism — the doctrine of official violence represented in the Indian
context, in its most generalized form. Whether we are for or against
torture will in ejfect be seen to have directly to do with what side of
Gandhism we are on. A look at the ideological battle order would make
this clear.

The torturers, the party of official violence, have, on one side of the
field, hoisted the banner of Gandhism on the nozzle of black marias.
Applause from both the wings of our comprador culture. Leading
Gandhi- ites like J.B. Kripalani and Ajoy Mukherjee, avowed friends of

On Torture and Culture

575

princes and jotedars and sworn enemies of the present administration,
urge even greater violence in defence of the regime. Outstanding
hedonists like the scions of the two leading liberal dynasties in the land,
who, respectively, head the West Bengal and all-India organizations of
the ruling party, custodians of the regime, are, on their part, pressing
for even more draconian measures to deal with attacks on Gandhi
statues and shrines. Thoroughly identified with the law, the Mahatma s
doctrine has thus brought about the fusion of the two elements of our
dominant culture. The beauty of a class struggle fought out in the open
is precisely this: it helps to elucidate ideologies in a manner never done
in a classroom.

Arrayed on the other side are the tortured, the party of revolu-
tionary violence. For them the vehicle of white terror and the white
bunting of ahimsa it carries are both equally hateful symbols of the
other culture. By attacking both at the same time they are trying to
expose the necessary connection that exists between the brutal and the
spiritual aspects of that culture. The liberal side of Gandhism represents
the latter. This is why icon-breaking must be regarded as an integral
and essential part of the present phase of insurgency. By physically
destroying a variety of liberal images, visual as well as institutional, the
rebels are articulating some of the cultural implications of their attack
on the infrastructure with great consistency. We are being told in a clear
and forthright manner that the liberalism of the college professor is as
much a part of our comprador culture as the medievalism of the vil-
lage tyrant and that a truly revolutionary struggle can afford to spare
neither. In other words, the intelligentsia have been put in the dock.

The Tortured Accuse

The tortured, thus, are also the accusers. The youthful fingers that play
deftly with grenades are also those that pick out the liberals and
identify them as active agents of a rotten culture. It is this realization
that determines and limits the liberals’ response to the current orgy of
torture. They are standing by ‘as passive and mute onlookers’, or seek-
ing solace for their injured sensibilities in private expressions of grief,
or as Rupadarsi himself does in Desk , trying, in the name of democracy,
to make the police behave themselves: ‘As a democrat I condemn un-
equivocally this sort of stupid and wholesale cruelty and unconstitutional

576

The Small Voice of History

activities by the police. From whom have they learnt that democracy
lacks the means of fighting terrorism?’ From whom indeed? From the
ruling classes who themselves framed the constitution and imposed
their sort of ‘democracy’ on the people. The constitution is nothing
but a basic set of laws which it is precisely the function of ‘democracy*
to safeguard so long as they serve the purpose of the rulers, and to by-
pass, subvert — and even overthrow, if need be, when they prove in-
adequate. The police are acting, in the present crisis, as the guardians
of the law which is above the constitution — the law of class rule. An
appeal to the torturers conscience is to ask the cheetah, in the classic
Gandhian manner, to change its spots.

It is in such attitudes, all ofwhich objectively end up in acquiescence,
that the liberal is seen to take his stand on the torturers side of the
dividing line. He is already a champion of legality which it is the in-
quisitor s task to enforce. They are both equally committed to the idea
that all desirable social changes must be achieved through institutional
means permitted by the given social order. It is for the liberal to pro-
pagate this idea and for the torturer to punish deviations from it.
Colleagues, they coexist in the same culture which it is their mutual
responsibility to protect and uphold. There is no other way for the
liberal to break away from this partnership than by consciously cros-
sing over to the side of the torturer.

Indian Democracy: Long Dead,
Now Buried

Since rhe early hours of 26 June 1 975 India has been placed under
a state of Emergency. One of its most noticeable consequences
has been the way this has affected liberal opinion everywhere.
Who among our readers has not heard the Professor of Political
Science muttering in a state of shock, ‘I do not understand, I do not
understand’? Poor Professor, his entire life’s work on Indian demo-
cracy based on the assumption that the ruling classes of the country are
the best defenders of its constitution, his expensive research project on
Indian elections based on much sophisticated analysis of fictitious
voting figures, his famous thesis about the Congress Party as the most
formidable guardian of the Indian parliamentary system, his brilliant
paper on Mrs Gandhi s leadership as precisely what the country needs
to save it from autocracy and one-party rule — all this has been undone
by one foul blow! Who can remain unmoved by the cruel disillusionment
of Fenner Brockway, a hardened case of liberal myopia, writing to the
Daily Telegraph (24 September 1975) on behalf of those who ‘were
proud of the largest democracy on earth and hoped it would be an
example for Asia in establishing social justice through liberty’ and
lamenting how Mrs Gandhi has let them down by setting up ‘as severe
a dictatorship as any authoritarian administration in the world’?

Yet it is characteristic of liberalism of this type that it should refuse
to face up to the logic of its own disillusionment. Confronted with all

578 The Small Voice of History

the unmistakable evidence of the failure of a system, it still refuses to
see anything but the failure of a personality. An editorial formulation
in the represents this genre. ‘Those who charge Mrs Gandhi with

identifying her own power with the wellbeing of the country’, it reads,
‘will see every step she has taken as pointing in that direction’ (8 August
1975). And the Times is not alone in vending this line of argument.
Innumerable biographers of Indira Gandhi have suddenly descend-
ed on us with their wares, and it is impossible to turn the pages of a
periodical without a piece of her psycho-history being pushed into our
faces. The twisted side of her personality had apparently been known
to these liberal publicists all the time, but for some unexplained reason
they went on writing ecstatically about her. ‘Indira Gandhi once
said something in my presence that I have never quoted’, writes Oriana
Fallaci in a characteristic opening in the New York Review of Books
(18 September 1975), and then confides to us the seventeen words
allegedly whispered by the Indian prime minister into her ear as the
incriminating evidence. All these revelations about the private life,
hidden personality, and unrecorded conversations of Mrs Gandhi tell
us less about her than about the intellectual bankruptcy of these com-
mentators who are trying to keep their readers amused by character-
assassination in order to cover up their own failure to understand and
explain the Emergency.

This by itself would have mattered little had it not been an ideo-
logical ploy to obscure the basic issues involved Indira Gandhi s per-
sonality is being dragged into the argument in order to construct
an antinomy between her and Jawaharlal Nehru and to suggest that
daughter and father are as different as a monster and an angel, as a
power-drunk maniac and a self-abnegating idealist. ‘The difference
between Pandit Nehru and Indira Gandhi is enormous’, writes Fallaci.
‘Saint may be an excessive definition to apply to a man with Pandit
Nehru’s faults. But he does deserve to be defined as an idealist and an
authentic liberal . . . He never humiliated his opponents . . . and power
was . . . hateful to him . . . Indira doesn’t fear power . . . On the
contrary’, etc., etc. This sacrificial killing of her personality — killing
by comparison — is intended to posit the idea that there is nothing
wrong with the foundations of the Indian political system as such and
that it can function without fault so long as ‘an authentic liberal* like
Nehru is in charge. The thrust of this argument is towards exonerating

579

Indian Democracy : Long Dead \ Now Buried

the impersonal aspect of the political system, its social character as a
dictatorship of big landlords and big business. Mrs Gandhis rule is
presented as an aberration in order to promote the illusion that another
individual — preferably some other leader of the Congress Party (as the
Times editorial, quoted above, hopefully prescribes) — might set the
errant ship of state onto her course again.

This argument is based on a historical myth invented by interna-
tional liberalism — the myth that all had been well with Indian demo-
cracy until an authoritarian personality subverted it on 26 June 1975.
The truth is that nothing has been well with Indian democracy ever
since its inception and that the present Emergency is merely a climactic
act in a process going back to the very circumstances of the birth of the
Indian republic.

T he republic was set up as a decolonized but undemocratic state. The
wars of resistance against fascism had by the early 1940s made the
liberation of peoples and the emergence of revolutionary democratic
states a distinct possibility in many Asian countries. British imperialism,
the most experienced of all the colonial powers and the one with the
largest empire at stake, recognized the writing on the wall in the Quit
India movement, in the militant nationalist (though wrong-headed)
response to Boses Indian National Army, in the massive strikes of
workers, students, and poor middle-class employees in the cities, in the
emergence of a democratic peasant movement under communist lead-
ership, and most ominously perhaps in the mutiny of the Indian
ratings of the Royal Indian Navy and spreading disaffection among the
Indian ranks in the army and the police forces. Faced thus with the
prospect of an armed anti-imperialist upsurge the British government
decided to defuse the charge by decolonizing which, in the Indian
context, was nothing but a pre-emptive strike against what could have
exploded as a full-scale liberation war the size of the vast subcontinent.
Hence decolonization was achieved, appropriately enough, not by the
destruction of the old colonial state and seizure of power by the peo-
ple, but by a ‘transfer of power from the British to the Indian elite
representing big landlord and big business interests which had many
links with imperialism and shared with it a common fear of revolutionary

580

The Small Voice of History

developments in the country. Consequently, the post-colonial state,
the product of a legal transaction between the dominant elite groups
of Britain and India, found it easy to continue, even as a sovereign re-
public, much of what was undemocratic — and a good deal was — in
the political institutions and political culture of the Raj.

Such continuity was not only convenient but positively essential
for the Indian ruling classes. They needed this in order to consolidate
their authority over their own people and perpetuate it by reinforcing
their dependence on and collaboration with imperialism. No wonder,
therefore, that the Indian state had, from its very inception, to conduct
itself in a singularly undemocratic manner. To the extent that for the
first seventeen years of its existence when Jawaharlal Nehru, an arch-
liberal, was the principal architect of its official policies, the perversion
of Indian democracy must be regarded as his own handiwork done at
the behest of the ruling classes. To the extent that these classes had
semi-feudal and big business interests to defend and promote, his
liberalism, far from being authentic’, was reduced to an empty rhe-
toric. Indira Gandhi has no claim to originality in either respect: her
conduct of government has been as undemocratic as her father s and
her rhetoric as liberal — until a crisis closed in and the rhetoric had to
stop. The present Emergency, therefore, represents no radical break
with a democratic past but an aggravation of a chronic denial of ele-
mentary freedoms and justice, as the following survey will show.

Ill

While the elite nationalist leadership was busy bargaining over the
terms of a ‘transfer of power’, a battle for democracy — perhaps the sin-
gle most massive and significant battle for democracy until then in
India — was being waged in an extensive rural area. This was the armed
struggle of the peasantry in Telangana. Starting off as a movement
against eviction and extortion it had assumed, by 1946, under com-
munist leadership, the size and character of a peasant war aimed aL die
destruction of the princely state of Hyderabad ruled hy the Nizam, the
largest and most powerful of all the many feudal principalities lovingly
fostered by the Raj. The struggle limited at first to 150 villages, had
already involved ten times as many by the summer of 1 947 when India

Indian Democracy: Long Dead \ Now Buried 58 1

became independent. A number of liberated zones complete with
peoples courts and people’s militia had already emerged out of the
guerrilla war by 1 948 when the new regime headed by Nehru and Patel
sent in its army with the twin objectives of annexing the Nizams
territories and liquidating the peasant rebels. The outcome of this
‘police action was the rewarding of the Nizam with a vast pecuniary
compensation for the loss of his dynastic kingdom and with elevation
to the status of a titulary head of state (Rajpramukh) in the new repub-
lic when its constitution was inaugurated in 1 950. Neither the oppres-
sive officials who had acted as the instruments of the Nizams despotism
nor the landlords and moneylenders who constituted its social base,
came to any harm. On the contrary, a feudal restoration was actively
promoted by the Indian army and in its wake the armed constabulary
wherever they established themselves in any of the liberated zones.
Encouraged and supported by them the landlords and moneylenders
flocked back to the villages from which they had fled for their lives and
seized again the lands, grain, and other property which the peasants
had expropriated. And the sons of the soil who had fought for the end
of feudal rule and for democracy in Hyderabad, who had effectively
undermined the Nizam’s authority long before the Congress Party
leaders were to recognize in him a potential threat to the Indian re-
public, had their efforts rewarded by a reign of terror imposed on the
five Telangana districts where the revolt had made the most headway.
For an account of the massacre and rape, brutality, and sadism which
characterized the activities of the troops who frequently raided the
villages as a routine operation against the peasants, one should turn
to Sundarayyas Telangana People's Struggle and Its Lessons (Calcutta:
1972) which in spite of its attempt to justify the capitulationist line of
the central leadership of the Communist Party of India, contains much
valuable information. Here are some extracts:

In Manukota-Khammam talukas 1 0-25 villages were raided at a time.
Hundreds of people used to be severely beaten up and made to run in
front of running lorries. Whoever could not run ahead of lorries were
tied behind lorries and dragged, (p. 198)

In Loyapalli and surrounding villages, people were thrown into
thorny bushes and were trampled upon by the military with their boots
on . . . The whole place was splattered with blood, (p. 199)

582 The Small Voice of History

These brutes raped 20 women in Balapala, 70 in Seema-Lapadu
of lllendu taluka, 80 in Narmeta and Nanganuru villages of Jangam
taluka. (Ibid.)

In Nereda 70 women were stripped naked, chameleons tied to their
thighs and chilli power thrown into the wounds, (p. 200)

Comrade Rangayya of Chaudupalli was tied to a cart and burnt
alive. (Ibid)

Comrade Ganji Satyanarayana of Malkapuram . . . and Comrade
Harijan Muthayya had their eyes gouged out, testicles cut and thrust
into their mouths, and later hacked to pieces. (Ibid.)

Reddimalla Bakkayyas (Kumarikuntla, Manukota taluka) head
was smashed to pulp with big stones. (Ibid.)

Facts like these help us to see clearly through the smokescreen of cur-
rent liberal propaganda about India having been an illustrious demo-
cracy which suddenly collapsed on 26 June 1975. On the contrary,
they demonstrate how the ruling classes from the moment they came
to power have suppressed the forces of rural democracy and protect-
ed feudal elements most hostile to the development of democracy.
Seen in the light of the history of the Telangana struggle the present
Emergency can be understood for what it really is — as yet another
twist in an already tightening noose handed down to Mrs Gandhi by
a succession of hangmen, the first of whom was no other than inde-
pendent India’s first prime minister and idol of international liberalism,
Jawaharlal Nehru himself.

One of her recent measures which has most upset Mrs Gandhis
erstwhile liberal devotees is her use of the Emergency to detain without
trial tens of thousands of her political opponents. The speed of the
police raids, the exceptionally large number of people arrested and the
fact that they include some of the leaders of the Opposition who are
as much a part of the Establishment as their captor, have all combined
to make it appear as a radical break with a tradition of liberty that is
supposed to have made India the world s largest democracy until last
summer. This tradition of liberty is a figment of the liberal imagination
and never existed in fact.

Indian Democracy: Long Dead Now Buried 583

The truth is that for nearly all the twenty-eight years of its post-
colonial existence (excluding a few months in 1 947 and 1 969-70) the
Indian state has forced its citizens to live in fear of imprisonment
without trial, known euphemistically as preventive detention. India
attained independence on 1 5 August 1 947. On 1 0 December 1 947 the
Chief Minister of West Bengal introduced the West Bengal Security
Bill ostensibly to enable him to deal with sectarian violence between
Hindus and Muslims, but in fact to lock up the left, particularly com-
munist, opposition, as the pattern of raids and arrests which followed
was soon to make clear. Again, on 25 February 1950, precisely thirty
days after the constitution of ‘the world s largest democracy’ had been
inaugurated, the Government of India, headed by Jawaharlal Nehru
and driven by the demoniac energy of his home minister, Vallabh-
bhai Patel, passed the Preventive Detention Act (PDA) in a parliament
packed with Congress Party members. Imprisonment without trial,
limited so far to a few states, was thus generalized for all of India. PDA,
renewed over and over again in annual and then in biennial and trien-
nial cycles, remained continuously in force for nineteen years until

1969. After that no all-India statute for preventive detention was in
operation for two years. Even then, in West Bengal where opposition
to the ruling party was most intransigent, the hiatus was made up, in

1970, by the Prevention of Violent Activities Act. And then in 1971
the Government of India brought in the Maintenance of Internal
Security Act (MISA). This combined the viciousness of the old PDA
with the sophistications of its notorious Section 17A which sealed off
all the loopholes of the superseded statute. MISA had issued directly
from the Proclamation of Emergency during the Bangladesh struggle
for self-determination, which the rulers of India used for their own
expansionist aims in that region and from that Emergency to this —
the latter promulgated in order to retain Mrs Gandhi in power in
defiance of the courts and popular opposition — MISA has always
been in force as a standing denial of the citizens’ rights and liberties.
The difference is that under the new powers assumed by the government
since last June the length of preventive detention has been generally
increased and the right of the courts to intervene on behalf of a de-
tainee altogether denied. This is indeed a serious aggravation, but an
aggravation of an anti-democratic tradition as old as the republic itself.

584

The Small Voice of History

Having originated with Nehru — and, in fact, he had himself taken
it over from the Raj — it had never gone out of use, and now under
his daughter it has acquired a degree of sinister refinement unknown
so far.

In order to dispel any misconception that all this is due to per-
versities characteristic of a particular ruling clan (this is how a liberal
interpretation in terms of an individuals idiosyncrasies often retreats
into explanation by family traits), it should be emphasized that in
using imprisonment without trial as a habitual instrument of govern-
ment the Nehrus, father and daughter, have acted in full conformity
to the constitution of the Indian republic. It is a curious though little-
known fact that the constitution which came into effect on 26 January
1950 does in fact empower the government to enact any law providing
for preventive detention. No less curious is the fact that Article 22 of
the constitution, which contains this particular provision, appears in
the chapter laying down the fundamental rights of the citizen. As an
embittered member of parliament once put it in the course of a debate.
Article 22 does indeed guarantee for every Indian citizen ‘the right, the
fundamental right, ofbeing detained without trial’ (LokSabha Debates,
30 May 1956, col. 10079). What an extraordinary democracy! And
even more extraordinary, perhaps, is the fact that liberal professors and
pressmen have for twenty-eight years been so ecstatic about it. One
thing, however, is clear. The suppression of Indian democracy is not
the work of an individual suddenly gone mad. It is the realization by
the ruling classes, acting through the government of the day, of the full
potential of the violence of a state which they had themselves conceived
of and set up as hostile to democracy.

It is not surprising, therefore, that a state which relies so much on
preventive detention should tend to develop into a police state. The
inflation of police budgets and the enlargement of the police force have
both been symptomatic of such a development over the years. During
the last twenty-four years police expenditure by the central government
has increased 52 times from Rs 30 million spent in 1 950-1 to Rs 1 ,564
million budgeted for 1974-5. Here, as elsewhere, Indira Gandhi has

Indian Democracy: Long Dead \ Now Buried 585

inherited and then gone on to reinforce her fathers original emphasis
on building up the coercive powers of the state. During the first year
of her government in 1 966-7 central expenditure on the police was
Rs 482.7 million. This figure increased by 50 per cent in two years to
Rs 726 million spent in 1968-69, by 146 per cent in five years to
Rs 1,1 88.2 million spent in 1971-2 and by 224 per cent in eight years
to the Rs 1,564 million budgeted for 1974-5.

There has been a corresponding rise in police expenditure at the
level of the state administrations too — an increase of roughly 100 per
cent every ten years during the last twenty-five years. The values of
the ruling elite are neatly indicated by rhc fact that in 1971-2, for
which I have some comparative figures, expenditure on the police by
the state governments exceeded that on account of medical and public
health by Rs 605 million, of general administration by Rs 336 million,
and of justice by Rs 1 ,867 million. Even then the phenomenal sum of
Rs 2,443 million spent that year by the state governments on police
was to be raised by 48 per cent to an annual average of Rs 3,632 million
for the quinquennium ending in 1978-9. Per capita expenditure by
the state administrations (that is, not counting central government
expenditure on the same account) on police in 1 978-9 was estimated
to be Rs 7.63 as compared to Rs 6.73 per head on medical and public
health in the same year. All these were, of course, estimates made in the
halcyon days when Mrs Gandhi ruled both by parliament and by
police. Now that she has chosen to rule by the latter alone, the people
will no doubt be made to pay even more for the reduction of their own
liberties.

These large helpings from public funds were used to build up the
police force to an unprecedented size and at an unprecedented speed.
The achievement of the Indian rulers far outstripped the record of the
Raj in this respect. A comparison of the size of the police over thirty
years distributed in two nearly equal periods before and after the trans-
fer of power should make this clear. The administrative area of Bihar
and Orissa taken together as well as that of Uttar Pradesh was in 1960
more or less what it had been in 1930. Between these two dates the
strength of the police force in the former region (Bihar and Orissa)
grew by 328 per cent as against a population growth of 46 per cent and
in the latter by 193 per cent as against a population growth of 48 per

586 The Small Voice of History

cent. The speed of this growth since independence is equally impres-
sive. Between 1 956 and 1 960 the strength of the police on an all-India
scale increased 20 per cent, that is, at an annual rate of 5 per cent. At
the regional level during the decade 1 950-60 the five eastern states of
Assam, Bihar, Orissa, West Bengal, and Uttar Pradesh witnessed
increasesof87.8,80.3, 19, 10.4, and 10.2 per cent respectively in their
police forces. The corresponding increases in the population of these
states in this period were 34.4, 19.8,19.8, 32.8, and 16.7 per cent
respectively. In other words, in this vast eastern region covering well
over a quarter of India’s territory and a little over two-fifths of its total
population the size of the police force increased in these ten years by
41.5 per cent while the population grew no more than 24.7 per cent.

There are some rather sinister aspects of this development of the
police force. For this is accompanied, in the first place, by a measure
of modernization intended to make it more effective as an arm of offi-
cial repression. Gone are the days when reinforcement of the police
simply meant more red turbans and bamboo staves — the traditional
insignia of the slow, tobacco-chewing man on the beat. Since 1 970 the
government has invested at least Rs 198 million to equip the state-
level forces with faster transport, sophisticated radio transmitters and
receivers and forensic laboratories.

Secondly, the central government, while increasing and improving
the state-level police, has been busy setting up its own paramilitary
battalions of Central Reserve Police (CRT), Border Security Force
(BSF), and Central Industrial Security Force (CISF). The strength of
the CRP has increased 375 per cent from 16 to 60 battalions in the
ten years since 1964-5. And somewhat more than Rs 387 million was
spent on it in 1973-4, which is over 287 per cent of what was spent
on this account in 1 968-9. The BSF and CISF too have grown as fast.
All these paramilitary forces have been used by the central government
to boost the power of the state police forces at times of popular un-
rest and occasionally to take over charge at die state level whenever a
conflict tended to develop between the central government dominated
by the Congress Party and a state administration run by parties other
than the Congress.

Thirdly, there is the secret police, the inevitable foil to the visible
arm of the law, but even more wicked if only because hidden from

587

Indian Democracy: Long Dead, Nou% Buried

public view and therefore not easily made to answer for its misdeeds.
‘Secret police are everywhere, wrote the Times correspondent from a
beleaguered Delhi in the second week of the present Emergency ( Times ,
5 July 1955). The truth is that the secret police had been around for
quite some time, but the kind ofliberal opinion that the Times represents
could afford to ignore it because it never got hurt. Those who did get
hurt had noticed it. Frontier , the fearless Calcutta weekly, wrote as
early as 1970 how Indira Gandhi had set up a super-spy bureau under
her own wing as a principal instrument of her war against what was
then the most advanced contingent of revolutionaries in the country —
the Marxist-Leninists, popularly known as the Naxalites. Even then
the news came perhaps two years too late. Mrs Gandhi had set up this
bureau, called euphemistically, Research and Analysis Wing (RAW),
as early as 1968 to deal swiftly and surreptitiously with any individual
or group who, according to her, constituted a challenge to her authority.
Even the powerful agency of official malevolence, the Central Bureau
of Investigation (CBI), was not good enough for her. The CB1 had to
yield pride of place to RAW. The head of RAW was elevated to the sta-
tus of a secretary to Government of India, thus enabling it to function
as an autonomous body responsible to none but the prime minister. It
has acquired for itself, at an enormous expense of the tax-payer s money,
the most sophisticated gadgets for espionage. And what is most impor-
tant, it has been granted a licence to interrogate, torture, and kill with-
out being accountable to parliament.

Mrs Gandhi has for many years now used it with great effect in
her counterinsurgency measures against the Naxalites, against some
of the militant rank-and-file of the two revisionist communist parties —
Communist Party of India (CPI) and Communist Party of India-
Marxist (CPI-M), against even some of the non-communist left op-
position as witnessed in the murder of an influential leader of the
Forward Bloc in 1970, and more recently, it is alleged, against her cri-
tics with-in her own party. It is generally believed that her son, acting
as her principal hatchet man during the current Emergency, has been
allowed a free run of RAW to enable him to generate terror at the capi-
tal. The power of RAW is so evident now that Oriana Fallaci, who
claims to be on shoulder-tapping terms with Indira Gandhi, has to
refer to it as ‘her personal spy system* by means of which she controlled

588

The Small Voice of History

the state mechanism down to the last wheel, kept strict vigilance on
every step and every phone call of opponents and followers, on political,
cultural and economic bodies, and on the press.’ And, says Fallaci,
‘Everyone knew it.’ One wonders why journalists like herself had not
chosen until now to tell the world about this secret police if they had
known about it all the time, why indeed they had been upholding India
as an illustiious democracy in spite of their knowledge to the contrary.

For it should be obvious to all but the most blatant apologists of the
regime that it had for many years been using these massive police and
paramilitary forces for no other purpose than to curb and destroy the
forces of Indian democracy. The ruling Congress Party patronizes the
police and uses it as a partisan instrument to suppress and harass the
parties in opposition. When some of the latter come to govern at the
state level, they too set themselves up as patrons of the police and use
it against their rivals and against any democratic movement outside
their own control. This is how the CPI-M, which had led an assortment
of leftist and social-democratic groups to power in West Bengal in
1969-70, insisted on nominating one of its leaders as the police minis-
ter and used his authority to fight against the historic movement for
land and democracy developing at the time in Debra-Gopiballavpur.
For in a police state whoever has the police behind him has power.
And this power has been used against the people by all governments
whether they represent the Congress or the revisionist communist
parties or any other brand of a corrupt parliamentarism.

The uses of the police in this sense are of course most clearly illustrated
by the manner in which the central government under the Congress
Party sought to suppress the Telangana struggle and the West Bengal
government under revisionist communists sought to suppress the
Naxalbari struggle. But the democratic struggle does not have to reach
such revolutionary peaks for the police to intervene and attack it. Ever)"
week, every day throughout this vast land, the police are actively en-
gaged in breaking up local and partial movements based on quotidian
demands for bread, jobs, fair wages, reasonable rents, just prices, ele-
mentary civil liberties, freedom from petty tyranny and so on.

Indian Democracy: Long Dead, Now Buried 589

Take, for example, the events at Moga in October 1 972. This small
town in Punjab, like other small towns in the country, has little to offer
in the way of recreational facilities for its youth except some cinema
houses. Here, as elsewhere, the sale of cinema tickets was largely
controlled by rings of blackmarketeers made up of the town hoodlums
arring under the patronage of the cinema house owners and with the
collusion of the police. All attempts by the students of the town to
persuade the local officials to intervene and ensure the sale of the
cinema tickets at a fair price had failed until one morning in October
1972 they decided to march in a body and demonstrate against the
blackmarketeers. ‘Then , wrote a correspondent in Frontier (4 Novem-
ber 1972), at the order of the Deputy Commissioner and the Superin-
tendent of Police, the police fired teargas shells and later resorted
to firing straightaway aiming at the heads, necks, and trunks of the
students. The students started running. Some took shelter under
cotton bales lying nearby. But the police dragged them out one by one
and shot them. Some students entered a nearby dharamshala (rest-
house for Hindu pilgrims) and a temple whose priest helped some . . . to
go away through a backdoor. But the police caught six students . . . and
locked them up in a room of the temple where they were beaten to
death. Some policemen entered a grain market where they shot an
eight-year-old girl, two labourers of the grain market, one person
standing in a chemist s shop, two rickshawpullers and some peasants
standing in the market. Firing went on for about two hours. In the
evening people of Moga collected and went to the Deputy Commis-
sioner of Police and asked for the return of the bodies of the killed. He
assured them that the bodies would be returned next morning. At
3:00 a.m. there was a sudden blackout and people saw fire on the cre-
mation ground. They came out of their houses and went to the crema-
tion ground . . . The police fired in the air and . . . loaded uncremated
bodies on trucks and fled. After that the people went near the site of
cremation and found some pieces of the bodies — they had been cut
into pieces. People took one body with the lower half and went in pro-
cession through Moga . . . The military was called out at five places —
in Moga, Jagraon, Ludhiana, Khanna and Amritsar. Thirty companies
of BSF were also brought into action against people at various places/

We have quoted at length from an account of the Moga massacre

590

The Small Voice of History

in order to illustrate how freely and readily the violence of the state
operates against popular agitations based on the most elementary
demands. But the students are not the only section of the people to be
thus repressed. Peasants and workers too receive the same draconic
deal. In the countryside where the arm of the law works in close colla-
boration with the landlords’ minions, poor peasants and agricultural
labourers are those who suffer most. In the cities and industrial areas
the workers’ struggles against low wages, unjust dismissals and sub-
standard working conditions are almost invariably met by combina-
tions of the police and the employers’ hired bullies to break up strikes,
intimidate trade unionists, and arrest militant workers. Official response
to the railway strike of May 1 974 provides us with a recent and massive
example. During the twenty days of the strike and for some weeks
afterwards the Government of India used nearly its entire force of
Territorial Army units, Provincial Armed Constabulary, Central Reserve
Police, Border Security Force etc., as well as bands of gangsters, to
terrorize the workers and force them to go back to work. According to
the National Coordination Committee for Railwaymens Struggle the
toll was over 50,000 workers arrested and detained without trial, over
10,000 railway employees dismissed, and about 30,000 workers and
their families evicted from their living quarters in the railway colonies
and their household goods and food rations confiscated. All this, one
should emphasize again, happened long before the present Emergency
and yet the liberal pundits continued to regard India as a democracy!

VII

When the hypocrisy of the liberal is most evident is perhaps in his
silence over the torture of political prisoners by the Indian police.
For nothing is more clearly a failure of democracy than the recourse
to medieval forms of inquisition in order to extract confession from
detainees and to destroy them by torture. In this, as in many other
respects, the present regime is continuing the twin traditions of Indian
feudalism and British imperialism — as exemplified respectively by the
landlords’ use of torture in order to force rents, levies, corvee, etc. from
their peasants and labourers and by the notorious routine of torture to
which the members of the nationalist secret societies used to be

Indian Democracy: Long Dead Now Buried 59 1

subjected by the colonial administration during che first three decades
of this century. But here again Mrs Gandhi has introduced refinements
worthy of her upbringing as a member of the Nehru family and as an
alumna of sophisticated European schools for rich men s daughters. A
study of torture used by her police against the Naxalite revolution-
aries in 1970-1 (as reported by two Calcutta weeklies hostile to the
Naxalite movement) identified the following ten items: (1) rousing
a detainee from his sleep and abusing him in the filthiest possible
language; (2) beating up; (3) suspending a detainee from the ceiling
with handcuffs and hitting him continuously on the soles of his feet;
(4) crippling his hands and fingers by blows; (5) breaking his wrists;
(6) inserting pins under the nails; (7) forcing a ruler or an iron rod into
the anus; (8) burning the skin with cigarette ends; (9) forcing a
detainee to sit naked on a blazing heater; ( 1 0) electric shocks (. Frontier ,
23 January 1971). This is how interrogation is conducted in West
Bengal. Variations of the theme at the other end of the country, in
Kerala, read as follows:

Torture is inflicted at many levels ... At the ordinary level torture
takes the form of beatings with hands, fists, lathis (heavy bamboo
staves) and rifle-butts ... A favourite form of beating is to hold the
head of the (Naxalite) cadre between the knees of (a) seated officer
and to fist him or hit him with a rifle-butt on his bent back. An-
other favourite is to kick the cadre on the solar plexus with a booted
leg. This, as said earlier, is at the ordinary level of torture. At a still
higher level ... we have a case-history where a cloth was wound
around a young undertrial s (a person detained by the police but not
yet produced before nor convicted by the court) penis and then set
aflame so as to produce a confessional statement from him . . . Even
more terrible is what is known in police jargon as the green broomstick
trick’, where a fresh broomstick (the stiff pine of a coconut-leaf which,
used in its green state, does not easily break) is forced through a persons
penis.’ ( Frontier , 30 November 1974)

VIII

Such inquisition is only matched in its brutality by the treatment of
political detainees in prison. The conditions in which they are forced

592

The Small Voice of History

to live, the violence inflicted on them by the police and prison staff
have, since the Emergency, been noticed in the Western press if only
because Reuters reported the beating up of 600 political detainees in
a Delhi jail and thereby brought upon its Delhi office the dramatic
vengeance of Mrs Gandhi s censors by having its telephone and telex
disconnected. Opposition leaders were reported on this occasion as
saying in a letter of protest to Mrs Gandhi: ‘We expect that you will
see to it that in free India occurrences of the type which we saw in
British days will not be repeated1 ( Times , 7 October 1975). It is precise-
ly because of an Opposition that can come out with a statement like
this that the present murderous regime can carry on with impunity.
For occurrences of the type which we saw in British days’ have not
merely been repeated under Mrs Gandhi s rule, but repeated in a much
more extensive and aggravated form than anything known under the
Raj, and yet the Opposition has found it convenient to ignore this
because the victims, so far, were Marxist-Leninists whose politics of
armed struggle made the operations of the corrupt, oppoitunist par-
liamentarians of all parties look like a silly charade. Even a largely
compliant press found it difficult to keep silent when in 1970-1 the
Naxaiite prisoners all over India were being starved and forced to live
in insanitary, overcrowded conditions, many of them in chains and
fetters, and all subjected from time to time to severe beating and in-
discriminate firing. Maiming and slaughter of young revolutionaries
held without trial were a recurrent event. Here arc some typical extracts
from the daily press:

Seven prisoners, said to be Naxalites, died in a lathi-charge [i.e. beaten
to death by heavy bamboo staves] in Berhampur Central Jail and 46
others were injured this morning. (, Statesman , 25 February 1971)

At least two prisoners were killed and thirty injured, some of them
seriously, when the wardens fired several times on unruly prisoners in
Bankipore jail this morning . . . The sudden, violent agitation by the
prisoners . . . was sparked off by the alleged suicide committed in the
jail last night as a protest against the bad food supplied by rhe jail
authorities and other forms of ill treatment. ( Times of India , 8 July
1971)

About Thursday’s incident in Asansol jail it was learnt that all the
nine killed had been beaten to death. ( Statesman , 7 August 1971).

Indian Democracy: Long Dead, Now Buried 593

As many as 67 political prisoners were shot or battered to death in
the jails of Bihar and West Bengal — only two out of several states where
the same sort of killing was going on — during the first half of 1971
alone. Indian jail conditions and killings had indeed assumed such
scandalous proportions that even Amnesty International felt it necessary
to overcome its habitual self-censorship and speak up against these
atrocities.

Why, one might ask, does the judiciary not protect the people from the
police? The reason is that under the extremely accentuated conditions
of class struggle in India, the judiciary which is as much an instrument
of coercion as the executive arm of the state can no longer go on pre-
tending to hold the scales of justice evenly. As a result the courts, the
police, and the ruling elite not merely collaborate with each other, but
are often seen to do so. The verdict of the Madras High Court in the
Keezh Venmani Case may be cited to illustrate this.

Keezh Venmani is a small village in the eastern part ofTanjore Dis-
trict in Tamil Nadu with a long history of dispute between its upper-
caste landlords ( mirasdars ) and the poor agricultural workers belonging
to the untouchable castes. The landlords had their own organization
in the Pandey Producers Association (PPA) led by one of the mirasdars
of the village, while the labourers, too, had organized themselves in a
union sponsored by the CPI-M. Already on one occasion, when labour
was imported from outside the village during the harvest season, the
two sides had violently clashed, with a landlord being killed and a
labourer beheaded by the landlords in reprisal. Then on 25 December
1968 at 9 p.m. — -so ran the prosecution case — the landlords poured
petrol on the huts of the untouchable labourers, set fire to them, and
started shooting. Driven by the flames and bullets many of the labour-
ers and their women and children took shelter in a neighbours hut
which too was then soaked in petrol and set aflame. All of the 42 per-
sons who were inside were burned alive. The operation was personally
supervised by the president of the PPA. He and 7 other landlords, out
of a total of 23 persons charged, were found guilty by a lower court and
sentenced to various terms of imprisonment ranging from one to ten
years. In view of the nature of the crime the number of the accused

594

The Small Voice of History

actually convicted and the sentences received by them appeared to
most people at the time as an extraordinary exercise in moderation.
However, the High Court of Madras, on appeal, thought otherwise
and acquitted all of the eight convicted landlords . Their reason for doing
so? Here is how the Hindu (14 April 1973) reported it:

Their Lordships, setting aside the conviction, pointed out that there
was something astonishing about the fact that all the 23 appellants
implicated in the case, should be mirasdars. Most of them were rich
men owning vast extents of land and Gopalakrishna Naidu [the presi-
dent of the PPA] possessed a car . . . Rich men who had vast vested
interests were more likely to play for their safety than the desperate
and hungry labourers. One would expect the mirasdars to have kept
themselves in the background and sent their hired henchmen to
commit the offence, which according to the Prosecution, the miras-
dars had personally committed. The Sessions Judge had failed to as-
sess the evidence of the Prosecution witnesses in a proper perspective.
Those who set fire to the huts had no knowledge that 42 persons
were inside and had no intention to burn them to death. The killing
of these innocent persons did not form part of the common object of
the riotous crowd. The evidence did not enable Their Lordships to
identify and punish the guilty.

If 42 charred bodies do not constitute good enough evidence,
what does?

The Supreme Court of India is the highest seat of justice in the
country. Yet it has been known to bend backwards in order to be
accommodating to the ruling elite in much the same way as the Madras
High Court accommodated the murderous landlords of Tanjore. An
appeal came to the Supreme Court praying for a writ of mandamus to
institute an enquiry into the act of the chief minister of Haryana show-
ing alleged undue favours to the promoters of Maruti & Co. This
company, the child of collusion between big business and the most
powerful clique within the ruling party, was set up in order to launch
Mrs Gandhis son as an industrial tycoon. The Government of India
issued him a licence to produce 50,000 'people’s cars* a year — although
he had no previous experience as an entrepreneur to qualify him for
such a venture nor had he any capital . Some top businessmen ‘donated*
the money to set up the prime ministers son in business while the

Indian Democracy: Long Dead \ Nou ; Buried 595

compliant chief minister of Haryana ‘donated’ some of the best pub-
lic land on which to build the factory. The scandal came up for a de-
bate in parliament, but the Congress Party majority there allowed
Mrs Gandhi to get away with it. And the Supreme Court dismissed the
appeal on the ground that it had no power to induce the Government
of India to institute an enquiry in terms of the Commission of Enquiry
Act of 1952, although ‘in similar cases the Supreme Court has struck
down such provisions of earlier laws and acts as seemed to conflict with
the course of justice or equity and declared that the said section or
sections were ultra vires of the Constitution ( Frontier \ 22 June 1 974).

The Supreme Courts collusion with the ruling classes also makes
it useless as the defender of civil liberties. On the contrary it has been
known to lend its authority to the perpetuation of oppression. When,
for instance, in the course of an argument before the court in the spring
of 1973 it appeared as if a habeas corpus petition challenging Section
1 7 A of MISA might lead to its abrogation and thus take away from the
police its power to detain citizens without trial, the attorney-general
of the Government of India requested the court to reserve its judgement
for ten days. This, he pleaded, would enable the government to amend
the relevant section of the act in such a manner as to stop all loopholes
and allow preventive detention to continue without the statute stand-
ing in its way ever again. The court complied and reserved its judgment
for two weeks, thus enabling the government to keep in jail without
trial tens of thousands of political detainees — about 18,000 in West
Bengal alone at this date (April 1973) — held under Section 17A of
MISA and other laws of the same kind.

It is thus that the judiciary tends to yield to the executive arm of the
state when the crunch comes. Yet the relationship between the two is
not altogether free from conflict. From time to time a clash does deve-
lop— a clash that reflects, at the level of the superstructure, a breakdown
in co-ordination between the interests of the big landlords and big
business entrenched in the government and those of the urban petty
bourgeoisie represented largely in the judicial administration and the
legal profession. The latter collaborate with the ruling classes at the
best of times, but are also exploited by them, so that their withdrawal
of co-operation (done, invariably, in the name of a mythical inde-
pendence of the judiciary), however temporary, could, in thccontcxtof
an acute and ongoing class struggle, act as the catalyst of a minor crisis.

596

The Small Voice of History

Not important enough by themselves to undermine the existing power
structure, such non-antagonistic contradictions between the rulers of
the society and their train-bearers, the Indian intelligentsia, who cons-
titute the main body of judges and lawyers, could still trip the govern-
ment and make it feel very uncomfortable indeed on some occasions.
One such occasion was when an unknown judge of the Allahabad
High Court made histoiy by finding the prime minister guilty of
corrupt electoral practices and yet another obscure member of the
bench at the Supreme Court refused to put her above the law.

What happens on such occasions is quite clearly demonstrated by
Indira Gandhis ruse to avert the judicial consequences of her own
electoral malpractices: she hid behind parliament and got the massive
Congress Party majority to alter the constitution in such a way as to
make herself immune from legal penalties for all time. That she had to
do it only shows the tightening grip of a crisis which makes it difficult
for the ruling classes to maintain even the facade of a rule of law. That
she could do it establishes beyond doubt the truth of Charu Mazumdar s
description of the Indian parliament as an abject instrument of class
domination. Far from being a forum oflndian democracy it stands, in
fact, for the negation of all democratic principles. It does so not merely
in the general sense that all bourgeois democracies pervert the princi-
ple of majority rule by using parliaments elected by universal adult
franchise as the means to legitimize the rule of capitalist minorities. In
this general sense the Indian parliament does indeed function as a
legitimizing device for the dictatorship of a handful of landlords and
monopolists. But — unlike the case in a bourgeois democracy — the
electorate s freedom of choice here is curbed by a variety of pre-capital-
ist constraints such as landlord authority, caste authority, male author-
ity, and religious authority. Since a parliamentary superstructure was
imposed on a society still largely semi-feudal in economy and culture*
‘the world s largest democracy5 was a sham from the very outset. This
is why it has been possible for all Indian governments so far to use
parliament as an effective and compliant instrument for legislating
against those elementary freedoms which represent a citizens minimal

Indian Democracy: Long Dead \ Now Buried 597

rights under all other parliamentary systems. This is why parliament
has so often and so easily been persuaded to enact and to continue pre-
ventive detention. This is why parliament has always been a principal
bastion of the police state that is India.

Thus it will be fair to conclude that democracy in India has long been
dead, if it was ever alive at all. Most of the life was beaten out of it
by Jawaharlal Nehrus anti-communist crusades and the rest by his
daughter during the decade of her draconic rule culminating in the
ruthless campaign to destroy the Naxalites. The Emergency declared
on 26 June 1975 represents a qualitative change in her assault on
Indian democracy only in the sense that scavenging is different from
killing. It signifies that so far as she is concerned no democracy is better
than a dead democracy. More importantly, it indicates the fear that has
seized her keepers, the Indian ruling classes. Everything has been going
against them. All plans for economic improvement have failed. All
promises have been belied. There is no deception left in the repertory
of any politician including Mrs Gandhi to generate any lasting faith
among the people. Even the chauvinistic dazzle of a military vict-
ory over Pakistan has dimmed with the years. And the masses are
restive. So much so that even an utterly discredited Desai or a cloistered
Narayan can suddenly emerge as a rallying point for explosive and
countrywide expressions of discontent. Under such electric conditions
even a corpse — a corpse as cold as that of Indian democracy — could
inspire an insurrection. Even the empty facade of parliamentary
institutions could fill the masses with hope and act as a symbol of
defiance. So Mrs Gandhi has had her orders from the powers behind
her throne to mount a scavenging operation: lock up the Opposition,
gag the press, expurgate the constitution, suspend elections — in short,
remove the corpse and bury it. This is what she has done by putting
India under a state of Emergency.

The corpse, however, might revive, rise from i;s grave and walk our
parched plains and dusty streets yet again.

Knowing India by Its Prisons

Mary Tyler, whose book, My Years in an Indian Prison (London:

Victor Gollancz, 1 977), is the subject of this review, lived in
India for 1993 days and of these only 130 as a free person.
She spent the remaining 1863 days (i.e. 93 per cent of her time) as
a detainee in a lockup at the Jadugoda police station and three jails
at Chaibasha, Hazaribagh, and Jamshedpur. Her experience of our
country was thus extremely limited in quantity as well as quality; in
terms of the size and character of the population observed and the
circumstances in which this was done it is hard to imagine a less re-
presentative sample of an enquiry into modern Indian polity. Yet she
has produced a remarkably convincing account. How was this possible?

For the vastness and complexity of this subject have been known to
baffle even some of the most perceptive foreigners equipped with all
the gadgets of social science research and operating in total freedom.
Tyler, by contrast, had no typewriters or tape-recorders to help in her
‘fieldwork’. How she managed to procure some writing material is best
described in her own words: ‘By asking [the jail authorities] for a peti-
tion form every week I was able to obtain a pen for an hour or so. I
would empty the ink into one of my medicine phials, and use it at night
for writing stories, observations, or poems by the light of the oil lamp.
My paper supply was obtained from tea packets, the fly-leaves of lib-
rary books, and the notebook in which 1 signed foi the weekly rations;
my pen was a thick srick taken from the broom/ And as for freedom,

Copyright © 1977 Ranajit Guha. Dedicated to Amalendu Sen. First
published in Frontier , 10, 1 1-13, 13-29 October 1977, pp. 11—15.

Knowing India by Its Prisons 599

it was the freedom of access to the jail compound as against solitary
confinement in a cell: ‘After three months confined to a cell, the com-
pound seemed an exciting place.’ At best freedom was the joy of ‘my
first view of an open road and fields after so long behind stone walls’ —
this during her transfer from one jail to another under an escort of
three police vehicles bearing seventeen armed guards, several Special
Branch men, the two women police and a wardress.’ How possibly
could anyone so unfamiliar with India acquire so truthful a view of our
country under such conditions? How did she come to know the life of
our people so well when all she saw of it was prison-life?

The book offers an answer at two levels. First, at the subjective level.
Beaten in her initial attempt to see for herself ‘the reality of rural condi-
tions'— she was arrested while lodging with a poor peasant family in
a remote village of Singhbhum district — and forced apart from her
husband, Amalendu Sen, the most vital of her few links with India, she
was locked up in a cell in Hazaribagh Central Jail. Her early days in
solitary confinement, she says, ‘were spent as in a dream’. To be in ‘solit-
ary’ is bad enough even for a native prisoner, but for a foreigner this
should be many times more oppressive. For while they are both denied
the right to communicate, the former can at least find umbrage in the
overheard phonemes, words and strings of constituents of a familiar
language that mediate illicitly between him and a forbidden world. No
such secret bridges span the silence that separates the alien detainee
from the others. It could indeed be so unbearable that ‘when the inter-
rogations resumed’, writes Tyler, ‘I almost welcomed the arrival of
plainclothes police officers . . . as a chance to talk to somebody, for not
knowing any Hindi, I was unable to communicate even my basic needs
to the matine, wardress or warder.’ However, even interrogations are
not held every day. And late at night, when all those signals that cir-
culate between the members of a speech community die away, a rising
moon, an owl on a rooftop, and a silhouette of peepul trees glimpsed
through the prison bars emerge as an alternative set of signifiers, as an
alphabet, so to say, of a language without frontiers — the language of
Nature: ‘I felt that in a strange world filled with a language I did not
understand and situations beyond my comprehension, Nature at least
was something familiar and tangible; I was grateful that imprisonment
had not entirely cut me off from her.’

600

The Small Voice of History

Solitary confinement had thus pushed her nearly to the outermost
limit of society beyond the last familiar signpost in any language
known to her. Here she might easily have stepped into that no mans
land where human communication yields to its mocking negation, the
‘language’ of Nature. But it is precisely at this critical verge that Mary
Tyler turned round and fought her way back into the world of in-
comprehensible noise that was India. She began to learn Hindi and
Bengali with the help of the only other inmate of the female ward in
Hazaribagh Central Jail who was literate and knew some English. ‘We
had no materials for study’, she recalls, ‘but used twigs to write in
the dust.’ A trained linguist — she had read French and German for her
first degree at a British university — she picked up enough of these
vernaculars gradually to use them in communicating with the other
prisoners. And once this was done the silence that had cut her off from
the rest of the prison community began to dissolve. It was no longer
necessary for the others to ‘speak’ to her exclusively by gestures, as did
the rustic girl who in those early days had devised an expression of
solidarity by means of a pair of contrasting signs — a smile for the fore-
igner inside the cell, followed by a grimace in the direction of the
‘marine’, the female convict trusted by the authorities to keep the other
women detainees under surveillance. Almost all of the latter came
from the poorest sections of rural society. With them as her ‘informants
Tyler launched into her ‘field-work’. She learned from them about
their diet and their mud huts; about seasons, crops, prices, and labour
processes; about landlords, debtors, police and paramilitary forces;
about castes, marriage customs, ghosts, spells, and the evil eye — a great
deal in fact that makes up the stuff of peasant life.

But the acquisition of vernacular languages helped in her schooling
only up to a point. One can know a language and yet not know the life
of the people who speak it. Language in such cases is reduced to a mere
fact-gathering gadget. It is the relation between those facts which
constitutes the truth about a society. This relation may elude even
some native speakers. Hence the total incomprehension characteristic
of our ruling classes, so poignantly expressed by Indira Gandhi (BBC
lelevision, 18 July 1977) when she ascribed her fall from power to
the failures of her intelligence service. What she doesn’t understand
is that no agency acting for the elite groups she represents can ever be

Knowing India by Its Prisons 601

adequately informed about the working of those forces deep down
among the people which eroded the ground under her pedestal and
brought it down. RAW and CBI are not omniscient: their operations,
far from being a function of their knowledge of the people, are in fact
symptomatic of an inevitable and pathological incapacity to know.

Sympathy

Knowing, for Mary Tyler, needs something in addition to a natural
language. It requires sympathy, a sort of language of the soul. Here, as
on a number of other subjects, she illuminates a point by reflecting on
an example of official violence:

Police interrogations continued in the Chaibasa Jail office. The in-
telligence officers were angry that the other women prisoners had lent
me a change of clothing, annoyed that I was already developing a
relationship with women with whom they had imagined I would not
be able to communicate. Because they themselves were out of touch
with the people, they did not understand that, even without a com-
mon language a culture of mutual sympathy can be established. The
Jailer, less any aspersion be cast on his authority, broke the glass ban-
gles the women had put on my wrists . . .

This symbolic destruction of a gift of glass bangles marks the threshold
which no technology or information can ever cross. Beyond that is the
realm of knowing where mutual sympathy’ explores the relation be-
tween facts. As the history of an experience of knowing, Tylers account
is indeed a documentation of the process of ingesting facts by sym-
pathy.

Sympathy is another name for her striving to identify herself with
her fellow prisoners — their suffering, their way of life, and their resist-
ance to persecution. She had already made a beginning in this sense
even before her arrest. It was in the course of an exercise in sharing the
life of a poor peasant family, the taste of stale soaked rice still sour in
her mouth, that she was seized by the armed constabulary operating
against Naxalites. The jails, far from acting as a deterrent, appear to
have stimulated her urge for identification and provided the conditions
for achieving it.

602

The Small Voice of History

The first step she took in this direction was to demand equality of
status with the Indian prisoners, that is, to court a negative privilege.
For this meant denying herself the right to preferential treatment
reserved for white offenders under colonial rule, which, for some curi-
ous reason, was still valid in Independent India in the early 1970s. In
all things relating to food, accommodation, clothing, and medical care
she insisted on being on a par with the other political detainees. This
helped to a considerable degree in removing what would have been
otherwise an elitist barrier between herself and the rest of the prison
community. There is much in this book to show how she won the
affection and confidence of the other inmates of the Hazaribagh and
Jamshedpur jails, and nothing illustrates the power of sympathy more
than the fact that her co-prisoners, nearly all of them illiterate peasant
women and children, came to accept her as a friend and sister.

And as for her own sense of identification, there is some very strik-
ing internal evidence to indicate its depth and authenticity. After a
while in the prison, she says, ‘I found myself unconsciously adapting
to my companions code of morality . . . careful not to talk loudly or
laugh in front of the warders or male prisoners so as not to be thought
“shameless” . . . avoiding the warden during menstruation so that
nobody could blame me if the vegetables were attacked by pests, etc.’

This is precisely how one makes a foreign language ones own — by
conforming to its conventions and using them instinctively to com-
municate with the native members of the adopted speech community.

In yet another instance of this yearning for identification deep
down in her consciousness, she refers to strange dreams and fantasies
in which England and India were inextricably intermingled. ‘Prisoners
from jail would be sitting with my parents in our dining room in Essex,
or I would receive a parcel filled with a mixture, of Indian and Eng-
lish food.’ A classic case of overdetermination, these dream images
point clearly to the convergence of an actual and a potential sense of
belonging: English by origin and culture, she wished to be Indian,
which is perhaps the most authentic subjective testimony of her striv-
ing for spiritual asylum in the midst of our people. ‘It seemed’, she
writes, ‘as if my subconscious mind could not decide which country
it belonged to. I wanted the impossible: to be in both.’

Knowing India by Its Prisons 603

But sympathy by itself could hardly be an aid to knowing a country
by its prisons, if prisons were simply institutions run by the state to
isolate, cure, and when necessary destroy the diseased limbs of a society
in order to secure the health of its main body. If there is any truth in
this clinical and Calvinistic notion, the stock in trade of bourgeois
penal theory (which contains at the same time an unmistakably medie-
val blend of theology and jurisprudence, as the young Marx shrewdly
noticed), the life of the prison must be the very antithesis of the life of
society, and as such a poor guide to ones understanding of the latter.
Yet here we have a statement to demonstrate that at least one observer
has come to know India by its prisons. How to explain this?

The answer must surely be rhat regardless of the theory of ideal
prisons in an ideal state, what have been put away behind stone
walls and steel mesh in our country are no dead tissues but some very
healthy, living chunks of society chopped off by official violence. Far
from withering, these chunks continue to survive and strike roots
even inside prison wards and propagate a sort of secondary society
there. Mary Tylers sympathy helped her to understand India only
because it had as its object one such authentic transplant in that other,
incarcerated republic where she sought and was granted franchise.

The Rural Poor

It would, however, be mechanistic to regard this secondary society as
a precise replica of the original. There is no doubt that one of the most
numerous and important sections of our society, the rural poor, were
significantly represented in the jails where Tyler was held. But even
these were limited local samples drawn from Bengal and Bihar alone.
And although she came into contact with some working-class and
middle-class prisoners from time to time, such occasions were far too
few and brief to permit probing in any great depth. If therefore this
secondary society is a microcosm of India, this is not so in any statisti-
cally significant sense at all.

What then is there about the prison that makes it such an authentic
image of our society? It is the fact that in all essential respects the rela-
tionship between the prison authorities and the prison population is

604 The Small Voice of History

the same as that between our rulers and our people. It is a political
relationship which articulates itself as a chronic and aggravated law
and order situation: on the one hand, an extreme violence of the state
and, on the other, peoples response to this violence ranging from
submission to militant resistance depending on circumstance and
consciousness. Mary Tyler s account has a ring of truth about it because
she has grasped this relationship in the main and documented its
moments with much objectivity.

The prison is of course a major instrument of coercion used by the
ruling classes everywhere. Even when the liberal bourgeois regimes of
Europe used to govern in conformity with their own laws, the carceral
network’ {le reseau carceral , which is Michel Foucaults term for the
institutions, techniques, and disciplines of detention taken together:
Foucault, Surveiller et Punir , ch. 6 et passim ) depended on extra-
juridical determinations, sites, and effects’ to make the prisons work.
No wonder then that in India where the dominant culture, that is the
political culture of the big business and big landlord classes, is authori-
tarian and anti-democratic, the rule of law tends to stop outside the
prison walls even at the best of times. And when, as under the recent
Emergency, the courts are made subservient to the executive arm of the
state, the extra-juridical determinations’ of the prisons are accentuated
still further. Mary Tylers five years in detention coincided with the
period when a state of emergency had virtually been imposed on some
of our eastern and southern provinces. Her two jails — Hazaribagh
Central and Jamshedpur — were strategically located in the carceral
network of the Bengal-Bihar region and offered her a ringside view of
the war waged by the government of the day on the most fighting con-
tingents of our people — the Naxalites, the militant rank and file of the
two revisionist Communist parties, the radical elements among the
Socialists and other left groups and large numbers of workers, peasants,
and petty bourgeoisie who stood up against tyranny.

By 1 970 this war had already crossed the threshold of the jails and
spread inside. In some respects it was simply a matter of physical exten-
sion in the same way as a POW camp is a continuation of armed con-
flict behind barbed wire. Its effect was to remove the objects of official
violence from the relatively open arena where it operates in full view
of the public and hold them under special institutional arrangements

605

Knowing India by Its Prisons

to enable the state to deal with citizens as the ciassificatory enemies of
society. Among the victims of this violence were Kalpana the educat-
ed revolutionary girl, Bina the peasant woman from Midnapur, the
nurses and hospital workers of Bihar campaigning for higher wages,
the railwaymen on strike in the summer of 1 974, and of course the ubi-
quitous Naxalites — all of whom figure in Tylers story. With them as
her informants — the mediators between the two unequal parts into
which her universe was so cruelly divided — she learned a great deal
about the life beyond the watch-towers.

However, the official pogrom against the prisoners contributed
to the process of learning in yet another and more significant way. Pro-
jected to the very core of the carceral system, the war on the people
was dramatized end elucidated to a degree hard to achieve under con-
ditions of the routine functioning of society. The prison simplified
everything: it eliminated irrelevances and brought the focus to bear
on the quintessential relationship between the rulers and the ruled as
one of pure violence. Tyler couldn't have gone to a better school for her
lessons on Indian politics. A sinister little detail of her experience at the
Hazaribagh Central reveals a lot in this respect. ‘Never having set foot
inside a jail before , she writes:

neither Kalpana nor 1 had more than a vague notion of prison regu-
lations. Probably my school mistress’s love of order prompted me to ask
to see the jail Manual. The response to my innocuous request in-
furiated. There was only one copy of the Jail Manual. That could not
be spared. The rules said it had to remain in the jail office. No, I could
not be permitted to go there to read »t. If the jail was run by the rules
I would not like it. Finally the Jailer came out with it. The Jail Manual
did not exist. It was out of print, the jail was run ‘by memory’.

Despot s Will

Amusing, but no less spine-chilling for that matter. The absurdity of
this anecdote hardly relieves the gravity of its implication. No, there
is nothing, not even a jail manual to interpose between the jailer and
the jailed. In a country where the citizen s access even to the lowest level
of the judiciary is hindered by a host of intermediaries, where one
must learn to negotiate a whole forest of rules and procedures before

606

The Small Voice of History

reaching even the humblest administrative counter, where ‘the armed
channel’ is an inexhaustible labyrinth separating peoples needs from
official redress, there are no rules and procedures or intermediate
structures which stand between the Prison Superintendent and those
trusted to his care. Thus on the very soil of Asia’s largest ‘democracy’
we have in every jail a shallow pyramid of arbitrary power where, as
Montesquieu pointed out, the only link between the apex and the base
is the despot s will. In the classic vision of the Enlightenment this will
was the source of Law. In India of the 1 970s this will is the very nega-
tion of law, a petty tyrants indulgence of utter illegality.

This modern oriental despot can do anything: he can decree,
command, punish, destroy, rob, kill, and maim. This Tom Thumb
masquerading as Haroun al-Rashid within the four walls of his little
kingdom can classify political prisoners as common criminals and
treat them as such. He can order a shooting on any pretext rang-
ing from a jailbreak to a breach of an unwritten order forbidding the
detainees to make their own tea. He can extend his vendetta against
any small number of offenders into a general assault on all political
detainees by having them beaten up by lathis — beaten to death in some
cases. Highly educated, he responds to polite and ultimate requests in
the language of bullies: ‘Be careful how you speak to me or you’ll find
all your teeth knocked out.’ Subject to no control, he can fly into a rage
at the least resistance to his brutality and have recourse to mean
and sadistic reprisal. When the women prisoners, unable to obtain
their ration of soap by any other means, go on a hunger strike, he sma-
shes up the communal centre of their ward — its mud hearth — and
confiscates all fire-making material down to the last dry leaf. His
favourite technique of teaching a lesson is to chop down the trees,
uproot the bushes and destroy the tiny parches of vegetable and flowers
in the prison compound. No object of affection is sacred to him: he
would not ‘pass’ the rubber ball that Tyler had got a visitor to bring as
a gift for the children growing up with their incarcerated mothers in
the female ward. An image of total alienation, he operates in a world
without shadows, without the delicate mediation oflaws, procedures,
parliaments, courts, or opinions. He is the Violence of the State in-
carnate, the red-eyed god Danda whose authority, we are told by Manu,
‘keeps the whole earth in order’.

Knowing India by Its Prisons 607

To experience this violence can indeed be a sound education in poli-
tics, but not for the passive observer. For the truth of this Violence can
be grasped only in terms of Resistance. And one knows about resist-
ance not by standing aloof, notebook in hand, but only by joining in.
What saves Mary Tylers tale from degenerating into either a vulgar
empiricism characteristic of so much academic writing on India or a
dirge of sanciimonious suffering is her sense of participation in this
resistance. Her sympathy helped her in understanding India only
because she never used it as a neutral perch, a sort of commentators box
from which to report a fight.

Sympathy made hei a partisan and enlisted her on the side of those
who would not submit without a fight to the reign of terror inside the
jails. There is no dramatic conceit about it on her part. It is articulated
by a few cool gestures of defiance towards authority and a constant
effort at identifying herself with her fellow prisoners — the binary
signal of a-grimace-and-a-smile she had learned from the illiterate
peasant girl who befriended her by gestures during her early days
incommunicado at the Hazaribagh Central. She was firm when firm-
ness was called for: she organized hunger strikes, refused to buy
freedom by false confessions of guilt, declined preferential treatment.
For the rest she went on striving, against the grain of her own culture
and way of life, to share with the others in her ward their abject con-
ditions of living, their spiritual misery, their love of children, the joy
of communal cooking, the risks of trying to obtain a modicum of
essential supplies for themselves in the face of opposition from the
venal jail staffand, above all, the pity and the warmth of caring for each
other and clinging together most of the time simply in order to survive.

This modest, brave, quotidian resistance constituted for her a
practice and helped her to objectify her sympathy into an instrument
of struggle against the conditions of her own bondage and that of the
others. Combined with some basic Marxist theory she had already
acquired before her arrest, it enabled her to interpret politically the
information she gathered from the other detainees. And it is thus
that she came to know India and write this moving and truthful book
about it.

Of die many things to be learned from this work perhaps the most
important, for the present reviewer, has been the realization that even

608

The Small Voice of History

a foreigner can know the truth about a people by participating in their
struggle against the violence of the state, and that conversely, no one,
not even a native equipped with the most advanced research techniques
and open access to information, can grasp this truth if he remains
outside this struggle. May this book blast the ivory towers.

Calcutta Diary

Dr Ashok Mitra, economist, civil servant, essayist, politician,
journalist, and now finance minister of the Government of
West Bengal, India, is a man of many parts held together by
an ardent social conscience. The book under review testifies both to his
versatility and to his commitment.1

All but eight of the forty-six essays in this collection are about India.
As the title indicates, it is a perspective viewed from Calcutta and
related as a sequence of observations — a diary — between 1968 and
1975. The place and the time are both important ingredients of this
discourse: they provide it not merely with its context but also its
meaning.

A view from Calcutta. This is inaugurated by an article, ‘Calcutta
Every Day — a four-page virtuoso exercise in 1 ,750 words packed into
a single paragraph written for Frontier in 1969. Only another of his
numerous contributions to that militant weekly and nothing else writ-
ten in that particular year have been included here — a twofold lacuna
which affirms, by means of a solitary representation, a stance, a point
of view. Calcutta, the author insists, this city denounced so often as a
tissue of contradictions, is as good a place as any other in the subconti-
nent from where to appraise the fabric of the republic. It is the puddle
that mirrors the sun. There is much in these pages to demonstrate the
strength of this vision. It helps to test out all-India generalizations in
terms of the realities of a particularly sensitive region and evaluate
broad official claims in terms of a specific set of local tensions.

1 Ashok Mitra, Calcutta Diary (London: Frank Cass, 1976).

610

The Small Voice of History

And tensions abounded in the period covered by the Diary , written
mostly as a column in the Economic and Political Weekly of Bombay
in 1972-5. Taken together, these articles can be read as a most lucid
introduction to the history of the last years of the rule of the Nehru
dynasty. It is almost universally recognized that West Bengal had al-
ready witnessed in 1 972-5 a dress rehearsal of what India as a whole
was to experience in the nineteen months of the Emergency pro-
claimed on 26 June 1 975. One knows of the terror generated by Indira
Gandhi’s son and his thugs in Delhi in those dark days. For a close
parallel, read how already in 1973 the hoodlums of her Congress
Party — euphemistically called the ‘Youth Congress’ — met at a conven-
tion to divide up Calcutta into zones of operation between its different
factions in the manner, says Dr Mitra, of the parcelling out of Chicago
at a conference of gangsters presided over by AI Capone in 1926. The
killing of critics and dissidents by torture in police custody and shoot-
ing them down in jail shocked the world about the realities of the
worlds largest ‘democracy’ in 1975-6. There was nothing in this
that West Bengal did not know in the preceding eight years. Read, for
instance, ‘Facism Shall Not Pass’ for the story of two brothers, both
students, murdered by the custodians of law and order sometime
before the Emergency: one of them died of ‘internal haemorrhage’
during police interrogation and the other was shot dead in Calcutta's
Presidency Jail. ‘Law’, under the Emergency, came to be clearly iden-
tified with IawlessneiJs, because of its blatant perversion by Jndira
Gandhi and her party. For some evidence of its earlier use as an ins-
trument of oppression and exploitation in West Bengal read ‘The
Emancipation of Kama] Bose’ and ‘The Story of Indra Lohar’ — two
of the essay s where the author is at his very best in his combination of
sympathy and sarcasm. The first reports an authentic case of a lower
middle-class citizen held by the police for sixteen months on false
criminal charges in defiance of as many as six court orders for his re-
lease. The other is the true story of a sharecropper evicted from his tiny
holding by a landlord and prevented from recovering it by means of
an astute manipulation of the law on the part of the bureaucracy, the
police and the landlord all working together.

The failure of the rule of law is matched, in Dr Mitras critique,
by the failure of the administration under the Congress raj to cope

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Calcutta Diary

with the most pressing of India's economic problems in such areas as
employment, prices, family planning, and food. On the last of these
topics he is particularly illuminating. I can think of no better guide to
the intricacies of India's food problem than the five entries (nos. 30,
32, 33, 35, 36) of the Diary devoted to this subject. The power of these
essays derives directly from an amalgam of the authors expertise as one
of our leading economists, his vast knowledge (acquired at the highest
levels of the civil service) of the processes of policy-making and the
administration of economic affairs, and above all his radicalism. One
of the incidental delights of his commentary on such matters is the
irony and scorn with which he exposes the utter uselessness of the eco-
nomic experts', indigenous and foreign, who thrive on India's economic
maladies. As one of the tribe himself, Dr Mitra should know, and his
castigation is no less true for being a sort of self-castigation.

Yet another theme which figures prominently in the Diary is the
state of the intellectual culture of Bengal, a region which has produced
many able economists but none more involved than Dr Mitra in its
vast and brilliant range of literary and artistic activities. Some of the
best writing in this volume represents his concern for and interest in
these activities. Tuned to the somewhat pessimistic mood of these
essays (I am not complaining, for what was there for an Indian demo-
crat to celebrate in 1 972-5?) man) of his reflections on this theme are
written up here as obituaries, both in a figurative and a literal sense of
the word — the death of the Bengal i-language little magazines, Calcutta's
dying film industry, etc., as well as real deaths such as those of an emi-
nent anthropologist, an outstanding poet, a humble singing girl who
made her way to the top, a highly talented and popular artiste who
ended her days as a pauper forgotten by all. Read together these obi-
tuaries stand as a record of the conflict between Calcutta’s vibrant
intellectual culture and the harsh conditions of its material existence.
However, one does not have to be distinguished to merit a notice of this
kind in this Diary , for one of its most sympathetic entries is about the
passing away of ‘An Ordinary Man’ — a homoeopath. If this reviewer
may be allowed to conclude with a wish, it is that when he, an ordinary
Bengali intellectual, dies the death of an emigre in a cold, alien land,
Ashok Mitra, a younger man, will remember him in a few sad lines.

Two Campaigns

It is the intention of all governments to represent the will of the
ruling classes as the will of the people. In those societies where
the ruling classes are a minority of the population this amounts,
of course, to a misrepresentation . To execute this misrepresentation,
that is to practise it there as a routine of government, constitutes indeed
an essential function of the organs of the state in periods of social peace.
However, some of these organs are so clearly identified as the mailed
fist of the state that it is difficult to mask their coercive role. So it de-
volves on the bureaucracy which combines ideological and adminis-
trative work better than any other arm of the state to try and make the
rulers appear as if they emanated from the people.

Copyright © 1979 Ranajit Guha. First published in Frontier , 12.8, 20
October 1979, pp. 3-7. and 12.9, 27 October 1979, pp. 2-6.

Numerals before and after the colon stand respectively for the serial number
of an item listed below and its page or pages. (1) Collected Works of Mahatma
Gandhi , vol. XVII; (2) M. O’Dwyer, India As I Knew It, \3) Report of the Comm-
issioners Appointed by the Punjab Subcommittee of the Indian National Congress
(1920), vol. II; (4) V.N. Datta, ed.. New Light on the Punjab Disturbances in
I919\ (5) Shah Commission of Inquiry, Third and Final Report, (6) G.S., ‘Vil-
lage Again , Frontier , IX 27; (7) A Correspondent, ‘The Story of Peepli\ ibid.,
IX 29; (8) ‘From the Press’, ibid., IX 32; (9) D. Banerji, ‘Health Behaviour of
Rural Populations; Impact of Rural Health Services’, Economic and Political
Weekly , VIII 51; (10) Idem, ‘Community Response to the Intensified Family
Planning Programme’, ibid., Xll 6-8; (ID The Emergency and the Poor’,
ibid., XII 9; (12) ‘Maharashtra: Vulnerable Citadel’, ibid., XII 11; (13) Arun
Sinha, ‘Bihar: Eclipse of Congress’, ibid.

613

Two Campaigns

When everything seems to be going in favour of a ruling class, this
role of the bureaucracy can be very deceptive indeed . This was precisely
what led Hegel to characterize it as ‘the universal class at a time when
in the first quarter of the nineteenth century the series of splendid
victories which had begun for the bourgeoisie in 1789 looked as if
these were destined to go on forever. It was left to his eagle-eyed disci-
ple to see through and expose this sham universality. However, one
does not need the young Marxs insight to grasp the truth about the
bureaucracy at those critical moments in the career of a ruling power
when its executive machinery can no longer afford the pretence of
acting for the people and is revealed for what it is — that is, as yet an-
other mailed fist of the state with the velvet glove taken off.

In India the campaigns for recruitment into the army and for
sterilization respectively during the First World War and the Emergency
coincided with and were indeed symptomatic of two historic crises in
the career of its ruling classes. Both helped in their own ways to expose
the coercive function of the bureaucracy with the utmost clarity.
Concentrated in nearly equal periods of somewhat less than two in
each case and equidistant in time from the year of the transfer of power
they indicate a remarkable Continuity in the exercise of state violence
from colonial to post- colonial India.

In both cases the involvement of t he bureaucracy was brought about
by a rigorous quantification of its tasks. During the First World War
the official drive for cannon fodder covered all of the subcontinent,
but regions classified by the authorities as the home of the so-called
martial races were of course the happy hunting ground of recruiting
officers. It was thus that a combination of colonialist ethnology and
imperialist disregard for the lives of the subject peoples made Punjab
bear the brunt in this respect. As Michael O’Dwyer, its notorious
gpvernor, was to boast retrospectively (2: 223), his province contributed
over 5 1 per cent of the total number of recruits from India in 1 9 1 7 and
over 42 per cent in 1 9 1 8. The administration took it upon itself to raise
more and more men for the army as the war progressed. While the
overall monthly recruitment in Punjab during the war averaged at
7,4 1 5 men, it started oft with a relatively modest average of 4, 1 33 for
the first thirty months and then shot up to 10,583 during the year

614

The Small Voice of History

ending in March 1918 and to 14,967 in the eight-month period until
the armistice. Towards the very end, between June and September
1918, the figure was as high as 19,500 per month (4: 87,815).

Nasbandi Targets

The pattern is not unlike that of the Nasbandi campaign during the
Emergency, except for the fact that the pressure brought to bear up-
on just one province by the British government was to be replicated
and in many cases intensified by the government of the Congress for
every state and union territory (UT) six decades later. The statistics for
1 975-6 and 1 976—7 published in the Shah Commissions report show
how sterilization was stepped up as the Emergency tightened its grip
(5: 207). In 1 976-7 the central government’s target for this campaign
was 171 per cent of that of the already increased quota set for the
previous year while the population actually sterilized was 310 per cent
of that in 1975—6. Achievement surpassed the centrally allocated tar-
get in each year of the Emergency, but only by little over 5 per cent in
the first and by as much as 9 1 per cent in the second. Of the 29 federal
units for which figures are given 14, including some of the largest
states, failed to reach their targets in 1975-6 involving a shortfall of
353,440, while only 5 units, all of them relatively small, failed in the
following year, causing an inconsiderable deficit of 19,139. The
achievement for 1 976-7 comes into perspective if one remembers that
the quotas fulfilled by many of the units were not those imposed by
New Delhi, but of their own choosing. The governments of 19 out of
the 29 listed states and UTs had revised their original allocation
upwards, quite a few of them by anything from 200 per cent to 385 per
cent and 1 1 of them exceeded even these — in some instances by over
100 per cent.

‘Achievements’ such as these were trumpeted by the authorities as
evidence of popular support for Nasbandi. ‘All this shows’, wrote a
leading official at the time, ‘that people by and large are willing to ac-
cept the programme’ (5: 1 57). The Punjab government too had claim-
ed that their success in recruitment for the army derived from what
they called Voluntarism’. Both the regimes dramatized their efforts
to whip up enthusiasm as best they could for their respective cam-
paigns. O’Dwyer s ‘public durbars" held at the district or regional levels

Two Campaigns 0 1 5

(2: 223) had their parallel in Sanjay Gandhi’s cours around the country,
stimulating at least in some states additional spurts of governmental
activity in favour of sterilization (5: 164). However, in neither instance
was the response generated by such stratagems in the least connected
to the voluntary involvement of the masses. On the contrary it was
produced, in each case, by winding up the state apparatus in order to
enforce official prescriptions clearly resented by the people.

Administration rather than popular participation was the key to the
success of both the projects. As the Punjab governor put it, ‘the whole
machinery of the Province was concentrated on providing men for the
Army (2: 219). And when the 1 976-7 quotas for family planning —
which had by this time come simply to mean sterilization (5: 1 54) —
were revised upwards, the central Ministry of Health warned the states
that ‘unless the whole administrative machinery is geared up ... it
may be difficult to achieve the targets’ (5: 1 55). This gearing up was
not done on the same scale in the two campaigns. No other provincial
administration was involved in recruitment quite as much as Punjab,
whereas the officialdom in all states and UTs was actively engaged in
the Nasbandi drive. Barring this, however, the mobilization of the
bureaucracy in the two instances had much in common.

In the first place, this was brought about by a vertical thrust from
the highest level of the administration reaching down to the lowest in
both cases. In Punjab the older system of recruitment by ethnic groups
at only four urban centres — Rawalpindi for Muslims, Amritsar for
Sikhs, Jullunder for Dogras, and Delhi for Jats — was replaced by the
‘territorial system’ which enlisted from every section of the population
at local centres distributed all over the province and even trained them
locally in some of the more ‘backward* districts (2: 21 9). At the same
time the provincial quota was broken down by districts and within the
districts by villages, giving rise to what came to be called the ‘village
quota system*. This required every village to contribute a certain num-
ber of men. ‘If the village was not prepared to give so many people, the
village punchayat would go and sit dhama , and until these recruits
were brought they would not leave the village’ (4: 1 88). And above all,
local pressure was generated by making recruitment a duty for all
executive and village officials (2: 219). The land revenue rules were
amended to this effect and recruiting was prescribed ‘as one of the

616

The Small Voice of History

matters in which zaildarsaxiA. headmen of villages were bound to assist
the Government.’ In Lyallpur, for instance, every zaildar was called
upon to provide five recruits and every Limbardar three within twelve
months (4: 94).

The activation of the bureaucracy in the Nasbandi campaign fol-
lowed much the same pattern. However, this was worked out more
systematically and on a larger scale. The most elaborate measures were
adopted by the stare authorities to plumb the local depths for the
highest number of sterilization cases. This was by allocating a fraction
of the state quota to each district administration and within each dis-
trict to the blocks, pri mary health centres (PHC) and other institutions
at the same level. Thus the Andhra target of 600,000 cases was distri-
buted by the state government among its 22 constituent districts. And
then a monthly target was assigned to each PHC, to each district, taluk
and teaching hospital, and individually to each medical officer at all
urban and rural family planning centres and to each member of the
family planning staffs (5: 170). In Bihar the district magistrates were
ordered to involve not only the officers and staff of the health and
family planning departments within their jurisdiction, but also prim-
ary and higher secondary schoolteachers, district superintendents of
education, subdivisional and district educational officers, panchayat
sevaks , village-level workers, circle inspectors, extension supervisors,
supply inspectors, block development officers, municipal and district
board employees, etc. (5: 172).

Horizontal Mobilization

Matching such efforts at a vertical mobilization measures were taken
to integrate the ranks of the bureaucracy laterally too in each of these
campaigns. In Punjab this was achieved in 1917-19 not only by har-
nessing the army and the civil administration together, but by promoting
collaboration within the latter between its revenue and judicial branches.
O’Dwyer has recorded his gratitude for ‘the most valuable help’ he
received in this respect from the Land Revenue Department ‘which is
in such close connection with the rural population (2: 219). One of
the ways in which the department rendered chat valuable help was by
amending the Revenue Manual to make recruitment work obligatory

617

Two Campaigns

on the part of lambardars and zaildars, any failure to do so being liable
to penalties under the Revenue Act. The result was to turn these village
officials into vicious instruments of oppression. As a lambardar of
Ghang in district Gujranwala stated, ‘The Sub- Divisional officer and
the Tahsildar ordered me to supply recruits and they did not care if
I forcibly arrested or procured them otherwise (3 : 882).

Juridical processes too were freely used to promote such coercion.
Magistrates and the police made it almost a part of their routine to
order the arrest of innocent peasants under Sections 101 and 1 10 of
the Civil Procedure Code and release them from custody only on con-
dition of their joining the army or inducing others to do so. The
fate of Bahai Singh of Chumbar in Gujranwala district was typical of
numerous instances, collected by the Congress Inquiry Committee on
the Punjab Disturbances. ‘The Lambardar of the village, at the ins-
tance of the Magistrate in charge of recruitment, brought a false
complaint against myself and 5 or 6 others of the village’, he stated.
‘The Magistrate issued warrants of arrest against us. Sangar Singh and
myself were arrested at 4 a.m. . . . Both of us were put in the lock-up
at Sheikhupura and were released after the village had supplied them
the full quota of recruits. The complaint under Section 110 was
absolutely false’ (3: 887). Apart from false implications of this kind,
the judicial authorities bent backwards to withdraw criminal prose-
cutions against those sent up for trial under Sections 101 and 1 10 if
they agreed to enlist. An appellate court which set aside the convic-
tions of a number of men of the village Yara in Karnal district under
the Defence of India Act found that the district magistrate had from
time to time issued orders to the effect that ‘if these appellants had also
supplied recruits from among their near relations or if they were fit for
enlistment themselves, they would have been let off, provided twenty
recruits were made up from the village as was originally demanded
from it’ ( 1 : 136). To the Punjab government such procedure appeared
to be very reasonable’, as its chief secretary himself was to state later
on before the Hunter Commission. But the result, as a member of that
Commission pointed out, was to increase the number of chalans’
by 200-300 per cent between 19l6-17and 1917-18(4: 191) and to
cause, according to the report on the administration of criminal justice
for 1917, a ‘large decrease in number of persons called upon to give

618

The Small Voice of History

security under Section 1 10 of the Indian Penal Code* (I: 136).

Much of the same kind of collaboration between the various bran-
ches of the bureaucracy was evident in the Nasbandi campaign of
1 975—7 too. Indeed it was this horizontal mobilization which gave this
campaign a status quite distinct from that of all other family planning
programmes. The latter had been, until the Emergency, the concern
mainly, indeed almost exclusively, of the health departments. By
contrast, as thequotas for 1 976-7 came to be allocated, the responsibility
for sterilization devolved on all governmental departments in every
state. Participation in the programme was made into a norm of official
performance, so that in many states the annual promotion of the emp-
loyees became conditional on their undergoing sterilization themselves
and/or motivating a number of ‘acceptors’. In Punjab under O’Dwyer
the drive for recruitment was based primarily on the collaboration of
the army and the revenue and judicial branches of the civil adminis-
tration. In 1976-7 it was the collaboration between the health de-
partments on the one hand and the educational, police, and revenue
authorities on the other which spurred on the Nasbandi campaign and
helped to involve the other branches of the administration in it. The
result, as we shall presently see, was to spread official violence as much
and as widely as in Punjab during the First World War.

Means

The means used by the respective authorities to bring about such a
mobilization of the bureaucracy vertically and laterally in both instances
were also quite similar in certain respects. In both cases these were in-
tended to serve as a combination of carrots and sticks, with the sticks
prevailing. In Punjab where it was a matter of enlisting rural manpower
for the army by activating the village officials such as lambardars and
zaildars, this was achieved by threatening them with dismissal from
office, with confiscation of their lands and forfeiture of their salaries,
or simply by the power of public disgrace and harassment (3: 402—4,
882, 898).

Compared to such measures the disincentives used by the various
state governments to penalize their employees for failure in Nasbandi
duties were for more elaborately worked out and at least as harsh. In
certain states such as Gujarat and Karnataka the Civil Services (Con-

619

Two Campaigns

duct) Rules were amended in order to discourage government servants
from raising families larger than the prescribed size (5: 175, 181). And
there were state governments that introduced penalties against their
own staff for shortfall in fulfilling quotas allocated individually to
them. The penalties included dismissal, suspension, demotion, transfer,
forfeiture of salaries, and so on. Two decrees published by the Bihar
government in November 1976 testily to the severity as well as the
pettiness of such measures. According to these all its servants who had
three or more children and still would not agree to be sterilized were
henceforth to be denied the opportunity to seek better official
employment by competition or interview; entitlement to certain cate-
gories of dearness allowance, travelling, and rent allowances, loans,
advances, honoraria, rewards, etc.; and access to free medical facilities
in government hospitals and dispensaries, goods at subsidized prices
available for government employees at co-operative societies, controlled
commodities and rationed articles, cars and scooters from government
quotas, residential quarters meant for government servants, etc. etc.
(5: 173). Disincentives of this kind were of course not unique to Bihar.
As the Shah Commission Report shows, they were a part of a pattern
common to all states and UTs during the Emergency. Indeed it would
not be far from the truth to say that never in the history of India had
a government institutionalized penalties against its own servants more
comprehensively in order to enforce a set of prescribed duties.

The consequence of such total mobilization of the bureaucracy was
in each case, a phenomenal increase in the violence of the state — an in-
crease both in intensity and in scope. The terror which spread through
the Punjab countryside in the course of the recruitment drive shocked
even those Indians who had no objection in principle to providing
cannon fodder for the Raj. One of them, Mahatma Gandhi, wrote
understanding^ of ‘the necessity that existed during the War for a
vigorous campaign of recruiting (1: 129), but the evidence which
poured in during his enquiry into the Punjab disturbances of 1919
showed that the campaign had been a little too vigorous even for his
sense of duty towards the empire.

The ordinary method of recruiting was described by a Patwari as
follows. The Naib Tahsildar of a circle would select a number of youths
for recruitment out of a list of all men between 1 8 and 35 years of age

620

The Small Voice of History

prepared by the lambardars and patwaris of that tahsiL He would then
send some zaildars and lambardars to arrest these youth under Sec-
tion 1 74 of the IPC with or without police help. The arrested persons
would then be produced at the tahsils for recruitment. At the same
time women of their families would reach the recruiting office, weep-
ing and wailing, but only to be removed by force. ‘Mr. Daley, Rec-
ruiting Officer, had two dogs which did very satisfactory work in
removing the female relations at his hint’ (3: 403—4).

Manhunt

Such ordinary methods’ were often supplemented by others which,
according to another witness. Very nearly took the form of a hunt for
men and were sometimes openly so referred to by those engaged in the
work’ (3: 793). These included raids on villages by recruiting parties
led by Naib Tahsildars and assisted by lambardars, zaildars, and the
police. The raids often took place at dawn in order to make sure that
the youths were apprehended while still asleep in their huts and had
no time to escape and hide in the corn fields. Those who tried to run
away thus were often chased by dogs and Sansi mercenaries brought
by the recruiting parties especially for this purpose. And as testified by
so many of the victims themselves, peasants unwilling to co-operate
with these efforts either as recruits or as motivators’ (to borrow a term
from the vocabulary of the other campaign) were subjected to all kinds
of physical punishment and torture. It was common for recalcitrant
villagers, even if sick or aged, to be kept standing for hours in the blaz-
ing sun, beaten up — often by shoes as a particularly humiliating form
of punishment, have their beards pulled, and made to bend double,
arms twisted round the legs, holding themselves by their ears (3: 404-
5, 600(9), 600(12-13), 878-9, 898-900).

Compared to these the procedure of coercion used in the Nasbandi
campaign was considerably more systematic and sophisticated. The
sanction in favour of a pervasive use of force which flowed from the
Emergency made everything so much easier. There was no need to
invent false charges in order to arrest people before turning them into
acceptors’. Mobilization for vasectomy was regularized under the

Two Campaigns 621

normal’ processes of law and order in two ways characteristic of the
last twenty months of Congress rule.

In the first place, all opposition to Nasbandi by word or deed was
treated as a breach of the law. This included not merely acts of non-
cooperation with the family planning authorities, but even verbal
criticism of the programme. Three schoolteachers in Faizabad (UP)
were detained under MISA for refusing to be sterilized and another in
Karnataka had criminal complaints against him for simply airing
adverse opinions about Nasbandi. Unfortunately the information re-
ceived by the Shah Commission on this point from the various fede-
ral administrations is far too meagre, and one suspects deliberately
understated, to come to any definite conclusions. However, even the
obviously incomplete returns from the states and one UT which con-
firmed that the law had been used against objectors have a grim insight
to offer. They show that as many as 53 per cent of those arrested for
opposing sterilization were held under some kind of a preventive act,
such as DIR, DISIR, or MISA, and the other 47 per cent under various
sections of the penal code— a distribution fairly representative of the
legalities of those times (5: 178, 181, 184, 192, 196, 203).

Secondly, the Emergency added significantly to official violence in
the propagation of Nasbandi by engaging the police as one of its direct
instruments. D. Banerji, whose perceptive writings on the family
planning programme have thrown much light on its politics, had
already noticed an element of coercion in the work of a number PHCs
in ten states as early as 1972 (2: 263-4). What however made for
the difference five years later is the institutionalization of the police
presence in this programme. This changed that coercion both in quan-
tity and character, increasing its incidence and legitimizing what had
been so far a rather surreptitious use of force characteristic of much
administrative routine.

Motivation

Between May and October 1 976 the state governments came out, one
after the other, with measures involving the police in the sterilization
campaign. The emphasis everywhere was to get them to do motivational

622

The Small Voice of History

work (5: 170, 1 75, 1 77, 1 80, 1 90). In Gujarat they were urged to use
their good offices’ to induce people in favour of ‘the terminal method*
in a concentrated family planning drive*. The elevated tone of a
conference of DIGPs of Haryana spoke for policemen in all states. It
acknowledged that the campaign had acquired the status of a national
commitment ... in which the Police will have to help the Adminis-
tration on a suitably large scale, and went on to declare: Action against
those propagating against Family Planning has already been taken and
should becontinuedundertheMISAorDISIR . . . we should educate
the people during the village touring about the advantages of Family
Planning and there is no harm in the Police motivating the people in
this respect.’

In Andhra every policeman was expected to motivate 2 or 3 per-
sons per month. In Punjab a force of 28,966 were given to motivate
26,175 cases. Karnataka’s 32,000 men were set a target of 90,000 in
order to spur them on ‘to take up mobilization work among the
public’. Indeed, ‘motivation’ could hardly be distinguished from
‘mobilization’ as Nasbandi became lor the guardians of law and order
their preferred site for parading the baron and brassplate of the Emer-
gency. ‘Motivation was exploited by them as an exceptionally fertile
source of power — the power to augment many times their customary
harassment of the poor by arbitrary arrest and extraction of bribes, and
the power to raid rural communities such as the Uttawar group of vil-
lages in Haryana where the entire state government from chief minister
to district magistrate was mobilized to enable a force of 700 policemen
to act up to their sense of ‘national commitment’ and press on the
obstinate Meo peasantry the benefits of the terminal methods (5:
28-33; 7: 3; 10:265).

Scope

If the intensity of coercion as used in the campaign of 1917-19 was
replicated sixty years later, so was its scope. All sections of rural Punjab
were represented among the witnesses who testified to the Congress
Inquiry Committee (1919) about the persecution they had been
subjected to during the recruitment drive. There were Muslims, Sikhs,
and Hindus and among the latter, all castes from Brahmans to Jats to

623

Two Campaigns

untouchables; all classes of village society from landlords and money-
lenders to rich peasants and agricultural labourers; all categories of
artisans from weavers andTelis to Mochis. Traders and Banias suffered
because they had to spend large sums of money in buying recruits. Rich
landowners suffered because recruitment had pushed up wages
everywhere by causing a serious shortage of labour and it was feared
that the supply of canal water in addition to the minimal amounts they
were entitled to by haqq would soon be made conditional on the extent
of their cooperation in the campaign (4: 94-5, 1 92). Even lambardars
and patwaris felt insecure because any failure to meet the increasing
demand for men made on their villages could cost them their titles to
land and office. And everybody was subjected to harassment, indignity
and in many cases, physical violence.

However, it was the village poor who were hurt most of all. This was
so because they lacked both the resources and the authority to shield
them from the draconic methods used in the campaign. Without the
means to hire labour, they would be forced to pay up in men or money
in order to buy time for harvesting if a recruiting party happened to
visit their village in that season as it often did (3: 872). A tahsildar had
only to seize their meagre herd and put out the animals in the burn-
ing sun long enough without fodder and water to make them yield
to whatever demand was pressed in the name of defending the empire
(3: 873).

The system of purchasing recruits added still further to their misery.
This was a system which allowed villagers to raise funds and pay them
out in order to induce youths from the more indigent households to
enlist. The rich, both of town and village, used this device to buy their
way out of recruitment (4: 1 92), and it made those who were the most
needy to come forward as cannon fodder. Inevitably the cowardice of
the rich and the helplessness of the poor combined to generate a market
in this commodity. Regimental recruiters went round vending their
ware to villages and to individuals pressed by the authorities to find
men for the army. A Major Pye is on record as having ‘found agents in
a dharamsala who were taking part in a regular auction held by rec-
ruiters’ (4: 95). Prices soared. Bhagat Singh, a Sahukar of Kaloka in
Gujranwala district, recalled how he managed to buy ‘two for Rs 250’
fairly early in the recruiting campaign, for ‘prices rose very high later

624

The Small Voice of History

on (3: 874). But it was again the weakest in the community who were
made to bear the inflationary brunt. The elite saw to it that their own
contribution towards the purchase of recruits remained inversely
related to their share of authority in the village. Thus, the village Ghang
bought 3 recruits with funds levied by the Jat joint proprietors at the
rate of Rs 5 on each proprietor and Rs 1 0 on each menial and non-
proprietor (3: 881). The poor had great difficulty in meeting such
demands for cash and were forced in most cases to raise it by pawn-
ing or selling off their utensils and other household effects (3 : 881 ,
882, 886).

Selfish Elite

If the elite used their dominance in village society to make the subal-
tern classes and castes pay relatively more towards recruitment, they
did the same to extract manpower too. In this respect the practice
and attitude of the rural gentry coincide with those of the colonial
bureaucracy. As a villager seized by a recruiting party was ruefully to
observe later on: ‘The Zamindar and other gentry hid their own
children and got the Kamin non-proprietor or village menials enrolled*
(3: 32). The Multan commissioner was indeed right when he said of
‘the leading men in the district* that ‘instead of enlisting members
of their own families they tried to buy or coerce men of lower strata
(1 : 135). But the common peasant treated thus by the zamindar could
hardly feel encouraged to turning to the sarkar for protection. Those
who worked for it at the village level concentrated invariably on the
most defenceless members as their first victims. There was nothing
unusual about the practice of the lambardar who when ordered by the
local magistrate to lodge false charges under Section 110 against
prospective recruits, did so against ‘several menials of the village* and
made them ‘rot in the lock-up for about 2 months* for no fault at all
of theirs (3: 882). No wonder that most of the Punjab recruits were
wrenched from the humblest homes. Among a group of 17 youths
taken away from a village in Tahsil Kasur, District Lahore, as many as
13 were from the Mochi, carpenter, weaver, butcher, potter, Tcli, and
sweeper castes. A fairly representative sample (3: 372).

In its general oudine this exercise in administrative violence was not

625

Two Campaigns

unlike what happened during the Nasbandi campaign. There too the
insult and the injury cut widely across the social spectrum. Some felt
offended on grounds of faith, and these included not only Muslims
but also many committed Christians and Hindus. As an old man was
heard to say during the 1 977 elections in a Haryana village, sterilization
was against God’ ( Guardian , 17 March 1977). More importantly, it
was the material sanctions imposed by the authorities which threatened
the interests of people belonging to many disparate social groups. One
can form some idea of the range of such sanctions from the following
list of goods and services for all of which the public are entirely depen-
dent on the government but the supply ofwhich was made conditional,
during the Emergency, on the procurement of sterilization cases:

Issues of licenses for guns, shops, cane crushers and vehicles, issue of
loan of various kinds, registration of land, issue of permits for cement,
fertiliser, seeds, etc., issue of ration cards, exemption from payment of
school fees or land revenue, supply of canal water, submission of appli-
cations for any job, exercise of food control regulations against shop-
keepers, any form of registration, getting transfers, obtaining bail and
even facilitation of court cases. (10: 263)

Inevitably, a lot of people got hurt. These included not merely
schoolteachers and government servants in the lower ranks, but also in
certain cases, as in Haryana, some sections of the rural and small-town
elite whose nomination or election to a variety of local and municipal
bodies, plug-points of local power, could be barred for not complying
with vasectomy requirements (5: 177).

Hurting the Poor

However, it was again the poor who were hit the hardest in this cam-
paign. Its methods were devised to suit their social and political
conditions, and not those of the upper-middle and uppermost clas-
ses (11: 378). In 1917-19 hunger and debt drove the Punjab peasant
to the front as a surrogate for those who had the means to buy their way
out of the recruiters’ clutches. In 1975-7 too it was hunger and debt
which made him an acceptor while the more affluent citizens, ‘even
though eminendy eligible for sterilization, were let off’ or allowed to

626

The Small Voice of History

buy their immunity by providing lower-class substitutes (10: 265). In
certain states, especially in West Bengal, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and
Kerala, near-famine conditions forced the peasantry to opt for Nasbandi.
‘Offer of Rs 1 20 or more turned out to be too tempting to persons who
were in acute distress’, even if such persons were aged, widowed, al-
ready sterilized, or otherw ise of little relevance to the demographic
objectives of the programme.

And here again, as in that earlier campaign, a combination of the
extremes of bureaucratic coercion and mass poverty gave rise to a
market — a market for sterilization cases, and along with it, as with all
other markets in our subcontinent, its parasitic concomitant, that is,
a specialized body of dalals. Both the factors in that market — official
pressure and popular distress played into the dalals hands and he took
a cut from both the parties, from motivators as well as acceptors. In this
triangular scramble over the small amount of cash involved in each
transaction, it was the latter who being the most defenceless had the
most to lose. As Banerji illustrates it by a case history, it was the dalals
who got away with the great part of the poor and ignorant acceptors
share of the incentive money (10: 263-5).

But economic hardship alone did not make the poor yield to steril-
ization. As to the case of recruitment, both the machinery of government
and the authority of the dominant social groups worked to theii
disadvantage. The symbols of such oppression are still too vividly im-
pressed on urban memory to need telling in derail: the rickshaw puller
unable to have his work permit renewed for want of a sterilization
certificate, the parents of more than the prescribed number of children
at a loss to find ration cards for the entire family, lightning raids at bus
stops and street corners by police and family planning teams to seize
acceptors’ for a quick job in waiting vans, and so on. Complementing
these in the country were the Nasbandis in weekly markets like those
in many parts of Maharashtra (12: 446); forcible sterilization of peas-
ants travelling by public transport as was done in the case of a party
who had left Alwar for Rewari in neighbouring Haryana to sell their
farm produce but were taken off their bus, led to a camp, and then sent
back liome with vasectomy certificates (8: 13); and the characteristic
collusion between landlords and government officials in some UP
villages to force Nasbandi on the peasants while making even the issue

627

Two Campaigns

of pa ttas conditional on their undergoing the required operation (6: 5).
The slogan ‘sab kesabgaye Nasbandi mein 'which gained some currency
in Bihar during the last general election sums up the catastrophic
impact the campaign had in rural areas (12: 456),

‘The system of district administration in British India, linking the
government at the top with the village community as the revenue-
paying and administrative unit at the bottom through a well-defined
official gradation’, wrote O’ Dwyer, ‘lends itself admirably as an orga-
nisation for mobilizing the war resources of the Indian Empire’ (2:
220). He wrote this as a tribute to his own handling of this machine
to step up the war effort in Punjab, especially for purposes of recruit-
ment. Similar self-congratulatory noises were made by the rulers of
India, too, as during the Emergency the drive for sterilization ‘took un-
trammelled executive action to the rural areas, above all in northern
India (Times, 15 March 1977).

However, such a total mobilization of the executive apparatus
produced its very antithesis — a mobilization of the people to resist
these campaigns. This was an ironic twist which neither O’Dwyer nor
Indira Gandhi had anticipated. Contrary to their intention, the sheer
size and organization of official violence acted in each instance as a
schooling in politics for the masses. It did so by dispelling those sleights
and subterfuges which under normal conditions made it difficult for
them to see the general design of power behind the particular acts of
government and enabled the ruling classes to sell, for example, the
image of a colonial bureaucracy as the ‘ma-baap’ of the people or that
of a post-colonial prime minister as the ‘Mother of the Nation’. Such
illusions could persist only so long as the engine of state was kept run-
ning at a low gear and its parts allowed to work in relatively loose
coordination, all of which had to end of course as the war and the
Emergency pressed on. After that the horizontal integration of the
bureaucracy and its vertical thrust penetrating as far as the village level
helped to elucidate the mysteries of power in terms of the everyday
experience of those times. One came to understand, more clearly than
ever before, that the issue of a patta or a licence, of rationed food and
canal water, of doles and vaccines was all governed by the same will that
inspired false criminal charges, preventive detention, arbitrary arrests,
paramilitary raids, and torture and killing by the custodians of the law;

628

The Small Voice of History

that thanas, jails, courts, licensing centres, administrative offices, family
planning camps, etc. were all equally the visible symbols of that will;
that force was what in the last analysis made that will prevail.

Out of this realization and based on the tradition of popular strug-
gles for land and human dignity there arose, almost independent of
the mechanics of elite politics, two great mobilizations of the masses
which culminated in the Punjab uprising of 1919 and the demolition
of the Congress raj in 1 977. The former, a massive and violent retalia-
tion by the people against the violence of the state, was used by India's
apostle of non-violence to take over the leadership of the Congress
Party and initiate the first Non-Cooperation movement; the latter was
used by his disciple, also an apostle in his own right — of temperance —
to take over the leadership of the Janata Party and launch himself into
premiership.

On Naming a New Aspiration

‘It was only the working class that could formulate by the word
“Commune” — and initiate by the fighting Commune of Paris —
this new aspiration. (3: 249)

In these lines of the First Draft of ‘The Civil War in France (not in-
cluded in the finished version) Marx is seen trying to carve out
of a mass of inchoate and still developing revolutionary experience
a concept of an emergent proletarian power.1 He pauses in the midst
of this labour to wonder at the word commune’. Even at this distance
in time that sentence still retains some of the heat the chisel gathered
from the rock it had been hacking away. The word commune, ‘a new
word’, he recognizes with a great sense of wonder, has just come into
existence. Not quite a new word, but an old word that has revolted
against all its traditional associations and established for itself a new
revolutionary identity.

References: The first numeral in each pair within brackets refers to a work
serially listed below and the second to its pages. 1. Lenin, Collected Works ,
vol. 25 (Moscow: 1964). 2. Ibid., vol. 27 (Moscow: 1965). 3. Marx, The First
International and Afier (Penguin: 1974). 4. Marx & Engels, Correspondence
1846-1 895 (London: 1934).

1 Karl Marx’s address to the General Council of the International Working
Mens Association, ‘The Civil War in France’ was written between 1 8 April and
30 May 1871 and delivered on the latter date.

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The Small Voice of History

‘It is generally the fate of completely new historical creations’, he
was to write later on in the final text, ‘to be mistaken for the counter-
part of older and even defunct forms of social life, to which they may
bear a certain likeness. Thus, this new Commune, which breaks the
modern state power, has been mistaken for a reproduction of the
medieval communes, which first preceded, and afterwards became the
substratum of, that very state power’ (3: 21 1). It was as if the word
communf was suspended for a while — for the duration of a historical
node — between two meanings appertaining to adjacent but mutually
antagonistic social formations. And these lines, written at a time when
the Commune was still fighting for its life against the Versailles army,
were witness to the struggle of the emergent society to appropriate the
older, medieval expression lor itself and impregnate it with its own
content.

The recognition of such ambiguity seems, however, to have been
the fruit of subsequent reflection. In the extract from the earlier First
Draft quoted above his intention was quite clearly to acknowledge and
praise the proletarian genius that named — and by naming it con-
ceptualized— the revolution the working class had brought about. The
spontaneity and fire of the Commune as an event — to which Lenin
was to add his own tribute later on (2: 133) — and its precision and
coolness as the word for that event: this was the paradoxical beauty
which Marx celebrated in his initial, thrilled response to what he
saw as ‘a resumption by the people for the people of its own social life’
(2: 249).

The Commune, wrote Marx in the First Draft, ‘was a revolution
against the state itself.5 Can a political formation that constitutes ‘a
revolution against the state itself be called a state’? Engels raises the
question in a letter to Bebel written on the fourth anniversary of the
Commune. Criticizing rhe Gotha Programme he says, ‘The whole talk
about the state should be dropped, especially since the Commune,
which was no longer a state in the proper sense of the word’ (4: 336),
and goes on to ‘propose to replace the word “State” everywhere by the
word Gemeinwesen [community], a good old German word which
can very well represent the French commune' (4: 337).

Lenin, trying to construct a Marxist theory of the stace on the eve
of the October Revolution, refers to Engels’ letter. ‘The Commune was

631

On Naming a New Aspiration

no longer a state in the proper sense of the word. This is interpreted by
him to mean that the Commune “was ceasing to be a state”, until, had
it survived long enough, all traces of rhe state in it would have “wither-
ed away of themselves”’ (1 : 441). Ideally speaking, statehood, that is,
properties of the state, must become continuously and progressively
diminished in the new proletarian state from the very moment of its
inception because its organs of power are required ‘to suppress, not
the majority of the population, but a minority’ and because ‘in place
of a special coercive force the population itself' comes on the scene
(1:441).

As for the term by which to designate the proletarian state of the
future, he remarks that there is no equivalent in the Russian language
of the German word Gemeinwesen, meaning ‘a system of commu-
nities’; hence, he concludes, ‘We may have to choose the French
word “commune”, although this also has its drawbacks’ (1: 44 1 ). In the
event, however, the Bolsheviks gave ‘the new type of state’ created by
the October Revolution a name that owed its origin as much to the
Russian language as to the Russian experience. They called it, as is well
known, ‘the Soviet rype of state’. In his report on the programme and
name of the party at the Seventh Congress of the RCP(B), Lenin de-
fined this as a new type of state without a bureaucracy, without police,
without a regular army, a state in which bourgeois democracy has been
replaced by a new democracy, a new democracy that brings to the fore
the vanguard of the working people, gives them legislative and
executive authority, makes them responsible for military defence and
creates state machinery that can re-educate the masses’ (2: 133).

That was March 1918 and Lenin, conscious of the fact that he was
speaking of an ideal which was yet to be realized, added: ‘In Russia this
has scarcely begun and has begun badly. If we are conscious of what is
bad in what we have begun we shall overcome it, provided history gives
anything like a decent time to work on that Soviet power.* The at-
tempts made by counter-revolutionary forces, internal as will as ex-
ternal, to destroy the infant state were soon to justify Lenin’s prayer for
time to work on that Soviet power.

PART VI

Exile

The Tartar’s Cry

In the many-sided work of Edward Said there are two strands which
stand out most conspicuously, more often than not in their
braiding. These are the political and the literary. Both are medi-
ated by his identification of himself as an exile. The question of exile
thus acquires a special importance in his oeuvre, delimiting it in both
areas and providing an existential core for each. In the realm of politics,
the self is exilic in so far as it is Palestinian; in the realm of literature
it is Conradian.

The political self is specific to a named place and culture as well as
a definite historical time, with all the diversity and exigencies these
imply within the bounds of such particularity. The literary self by
contrast, has a universal thrust transcending specific themes, plots,
characters, etc. , for Said was committed to the notion of the universality
of literature. Thus, the two selves diverged in opposite directions.

There is a matching divergence that characterizes the temporal
dimension of the existential concern. In the political aspect, it revolves
around hope or, privatively, hopelessness. That is, it inhabits a present
which, with all its awareness of the past, is future-directed. In its lite-
rary aspect, however, the existential is usually problematized and dis-
cussed in terms of communication, hence language and community,
a great deal of which has recollection and experience, that is, the past
for its content.

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The Small Voice of History

The problem of exile thus occupies a substantial part of Said s writ-
ings. I dont know of anyone who has contributed so much on the
subject so memorably during the last fifty years. It is as if the predica-
ment of exilic existence had acquired a sort of paradigmatic significance
in his view of the world and his times, and there was nothing in the
human condition that, for him, was not a metaphor of this dialectic
of otherness. Here I shall limit myself to a discussion of only one aspect
of that dialectic, namely, the exiles relation to the host community —
a problem addressed by Said so often in his work.

Said made much use of Conrad s story ‘Amy Foster as a basic text for
his reflections on exile.1 Here the immigrants predicament hinges on
the difficulty of verbal communication between him and the natives.
This, for Said, is a classic instance of language as the defining princi-
ple of the exiles relationship with his hosts. In what follows we shall
try to assess this idea in the light of Anton Chekhovs story ‘In Exile*
(1892). 2

The universe of exile in this narrative has neither the scale nor the
density of most representations of this genre, including those by
Conrad. For, in sharp contrast, what we have is a microcosm uncluttered
by non-essential details. The scene is a Siberian penal colony in Tsarist
times. The landscape: a no-frills Beckettian stage setting, with little
in it except a dark, cold river with icc on it even long after Easter, bare
banks of pitted clay, and indeed nothing but clay everywhere. For other
props, it is equally spare with just a barge moored at the riverside and
a hut the convicts use for rest and sleep.

That brings us to the human material. This matches the bare
economy of the natural surroundings. What we have is a minimal
community of just three convicts. Two are nameless and the third, the
oldest and most articulate, is known by his nickname ‘Preacher, re-
placing his actual prenom ‘Semyon*. The deletion of the primary
name-bearing identities signifies how these have collapsed under the

1 Edward W. Said, The World, the Text and the Critic (London: Faber &
Faber, 1984), p. 104.

2 Anton Chekhov, Selected Stories , trans. Ann Dunnigan (New York: New
American Library, 1960), pp. 123-32.

637

The Tartar's Cry

weight of banishment reducing what was once human into a sheer
mass of species-being. What sustains it is solely an instinct for survival.
It is content to stagnate and be what it has always been through-
out the sunless winter of seemingly perpetual displacement. It does not
need and is conspicuous for its lack of such attributes as solidarity and
compassion so essential for the making of a human community. How
can life take root in such a sterile social formation?

The question comes into sharp relief as a stranger, a new exile,
arrives. He is not explicitly made to feel unwelcome, but is kept at a
distance by the others, first, because he is an outsider, and secondly,
because he is ethnically not their kind. The young man from the Sim-
birsk region is immediately identified as aTartar and would henceforth
be known as ‘the Tartar . They don’t know' his name, says the author.
Perhaps they don’t care to. For they expect, without being so aware,
that he too is bound to merge into an anonymous lump like themselves.

But the Tartar is too young and still too much in love with life to
accept exile as a state of virtual interment. Unlike the others he has not
been dulled enough in his sensibility yet to feel at home in his new
habitat. The landscape disappoints him in striking contrast to what he
has been used to. Even the Siberian night sky does not compare
favourably with the one left behind in his village.

What is worse is that there is no human friendship to shelter him
from the hostility of nature. For the others have been brutalized to the
point of having lost all fellow-feeling. Each lives for himself, never
mind what happens to the rest. They are not keen to share anything
even among themselves except when they have to do so for a deal at the
expense of someone outside the group. Thus, Preacher wouldn’t share
his bottle of alcohol with anyone at all. However, when they work as
bargemen, as the Tartar does as well, and the passengers leave some tips,
it is his comrades who divide the amount among themselves. The
Tartar gets nothing and is openly ridiculed by them as one who was
so easy to cheat. No wonder the ten kopecks he earns as wages for a 24-
hour-day do not stretch far enough to pay for food and clothing. He
is always hungry and cold, and since he has nothing to cover himself
with he lies down on the cold floor of the hut; he has to make a fire on
the river bank to keep himself warm as he sits out the windy nights.

Still, he seems to have the stamina to put up with such hardship.
What, however, upsets him is the relentless hectoring to which he is

638

The Small Voice of History

subjected by Preacher at the slightest expression of discontent. True to
his sobriquet, the latter would pour on him loads of his pet theories
about the goodness of life in exile, the moral imperative about the need
to submit to the given condition, the futility of any protest or dissent
whatsoever, and, indeed, the utter sinfulness of doing so. For, according
to him, the urge for freedom and the desire to be reunited with ones
family are nothing but Evil, and to indulge in such thoughts is to be
tempted by the Devil. And so forth. Everything he says is bolstered by
the authority he claims to being a deacons son and a member of the
clergy himself. But the Tartar is not impressed, for such an attitude
runs counter to what he has been led by experience to trust and cherish
dearly. He stands up to the cynicism of Preacher’s point of view and
affirms his own faith in life. However, late one evening when the old
man delivers yet another of those lectures and has a last swig at his flask
before retiring to the hut, the Tartar feels so utterly isolated and driven
to despair that he breaks out in a cry. The others hear it as they are about
to fall asleep. ‘What’s that?’ says one. ‘Its the Tartar crying’, replies his
mate. ‘He’ll get uV3u-used to it*, adds Preacher.

What is one to make of this cry? It has no words, hence nothing that
can make lexical sense. However, understanding doesn’t always and
necessarily depend on words alone. Words often need gestures to make
a discourse understandable. Sometimes a mere gesture can speak a lot,
which would, of course, require visuali ty. We have to see our interlocutor
for access to his message. But in this instance he is not within sight. We
only hear a disembodied voice carried by the wind. Still, it could per-
haps mean something if one knew the context. The men in the hut
knew that. They had heard the Tartar often enough to recognize it as
his voice and understand it as an expression of how he felt being so far
from home.

Preacher, too, interprets the cry in terms of what he already knows
and responds as he has always done until now with his well-rehearsed
phrase. That, after all, is in the very nature of interpretation. The inter-
preters presuppositions are its building blocks. But such construc-
tions would work only in a speech community where words serve for
medium of exchange between its members. Such transactions are not
specific to any particular country or culture but an existential reality
in the life of the other wretched of the earth everywhere. Whenever

639

The Tartar's Cry

they meet as friends, neighbours, or relatives, they use words to convey
the most intimate messages of sadness or joy to the other members of
the community. But what if there’s no community? To ask this ques-
tion is of course to put a different spin on the problem. For community
implies being with one another and there can be no such being without
a common fund of words shared by all.

This is illustrated powerfully in Conrad s story, ‘Amy Foster’. Here,
language determines the fate of Yankoo the exile with a stern hand. A
Carpathian castaway stranded in a coastal village in England after a
shipwreck, he had to pick up some English as a necessary precondition
for even a modicum of local acceptance. But when a severe illness made
him forget that and left him with his mother-tongue as the only means
of communication, he was deserted by the village girl with whom he
had been happily married. Once it was clear that he wouldn’t be able
to say ‘Open, Sesame’ again, the community slammed its doors on
him. He lay dying as lonely as he had been on the day of his arrival in
the village.

A sad story, it is in many ways typical of much that we get to read
on migration. More often than nor the question of misunderstanding
between immigrants and host communities tends to be interpreted in
the vast literature on the subject as a failure in communication that is
verbal, gestural, sartorial, cultural, and so forth, or broadly speaking,
linguistic. But I doubt if what we have in the Siberian tale can be ex-
plained in those terms: for one thing, the verbal exchange between
Preacher and the Tartar doesn't seem to have been inhibited by any
difficulty on the pan of either in grasping what his interlocutor had to
say. On the contrary, the Tanar, with all his faulty Russian, made him-
self clear enough to draw a quick retort from Preacher to whatever he
said while he, in his turn, was equally prompt and unhesitating in his
response. So, if there had been a failure in mutual comprehension its
source must be sought elsewhere and not in any inadequacy of verbal
expression. Furthermore, Conrad’s story differs from Chekhov’s in yet
another important respect. It was the community that abandoned the
Carpathian insofar as it was his wife who left him in his dying hour and
she was virtually all that the local society had been for him throughout
his exile. In striking contrast, the Tartar was the one who set himself
apart from the others as he so unmistakably gave vent to his despair.

640 The Small Voice of History

Clearly, verbal misunderstanding would not do for an explanation. So
what was it, if not linguistic incompatibility, that exploded in such a
howl? Was he trying to convey the sense of an incompatibility of some
other kind?

Preacher, of course, could not be bothered with such questions. From
his point of view, he had said the last word on the subject, as he heard
the cry: ‘He’ll get used to it!’ The pronouncement has all the assurance
of a theological truth and expects to be taken for a closure beyond
questioning. Yet one wonders what he means by reiterating once again
his confidence that the young man will get used to ‘it’, as he must as
a matter of course. What does ‘it’ stand for? Since the phrase has oc-
curred several times in his homilies and he has been at pains to explain
it in detail, we don’t have to look far for an answer.

The text makes it abundantly clear that getting used’ is a code-name
for what is regarded here as the need for the exile to submit willingly
to his condition. So Preacher goes on declaiming it as if it has the in-
exorability of a law of nature. One must conform, and not to do so is
to invite disaster. But the Tartar is not persuaded. Such a point of view
is hostile to all that he values in his passionate attachment to life. So
he stands firm in his resolve not to accept it. In consequence, the
narrative shapes up as a clash between two attitudes, one that is life-
denying and the other life-affirming.

The contrast, to put it synoptically at the expense, alas, of much of
the humour and pathos of the original, hinges on the interaction
between two competing views of life in an exilic condition. Thus, the
young man, severed so recently from his native background, is still
wrapped up in thoughts about his family and village left behind. In
fact, such recollections are essential as help to him to cope with the
inhospitable climate, the want of food and shelter, and the unfriendly
company into which he has been forced by circumstance. Far from
being a debilitating pathology, memory is, therefore, a formidable
source of strength for h»m. It enables him to look beyond the deadly
actuality of exile so that he can hope to be reunited soon with his wife
and mother and eventually be free again. However difficult the present

641

The Tartar's Cry

may be, memory bends the past in a loop to gather the joy of lived
experience as the power he needs for the lift-up and thrust ahead to the
future.

All this is anathema to Preacher. He would have nothing to do either
with the past or the future. Only the present matters to him to the total
exclusion of the other two aspects of time. So absolute is his com-
mitment in this respect that it stands for him almost as a doctrinal
truth. He lashes out as soon as he hears that the Tartar is hoping to
have his mother and wife join him in Siberia. And what do you want
a mother and wife for?’ he asks. For he is convinced that it is ‘just
foolishness, simply a malaise caused by the Devil tempting the unwary
with such things as familial sentiments or urge for freedom. ‘Don’t
listen to him’, he advises; ‘Don’t give in to him.’ He claims to speak
from his own experience. The Devil put the same temptations in his
way, but he spurned him straightaway saying, ‘1 want nothing.’ The
Tartar, too, must stand up to the Evil One and say ‘1 want nothing! No
father, no mother, no wife, no freedom, no house nor home! I want
nothing.’ He who fails to do so, gets altogether lost. ‘No salvation
for him. He’ll be stuck fast in the bog, up to his ears, and he’ll never
get out.’

It is the sheer present, shorn of past and future, that Preacher claims
as what suits him best. It appeals to him as a perpetual Now, subject
to no change. Even in summer, when the others leave in search of food
and work all over the region, he stays put where he is, happily settled
in routine labour on the ferry boat, plying back and forth between the
banks. ‘For twenty-two years now that’s what I’ve been doing’, he
boasts. ‘Day and night. The pike and the salmon under the water and
me on it. That’s all I want. God give everyone such a life.’

To drive home the virtues of such a way of life he goes on to tell the
story of a gentleman-convict. Distinguished as he was by birth and
education from you, foolish peasants’, he says pointedly to the Tartar,
he too was lured by the Devil and with dire consequences. For he mis-
sed his wife so much that when she eventually arrives he sets up a home
in style for her and their baby girl. Just so much ‘luxury, in short, in-
dulgence’. But three years at the outback was apparently enough for
her and she eloped with an officer. Undaunted, the exile still looked for
happiness. He did not give up hope and continued to believe that even

642

The Small Voice of History

in Siberia people could live. For he had his daughter and this helped
to sustain his faith in the future. But Preacher had his doubts, and sure
enough she was struck by tuberculosis as she reached the very prime
of her life and started wasting away. Yet her father looked after her with
unrelenting care. He spent vast sums of money on doctors and medi-
cine, money that, according to Preacher, would have been better spent
on drinks, for ‘She will die anyway*, as he cynically observed.

Years later, not long after the Tartar had arrived at the settlement,
he saw the gentleman at the ferry as he was on his way to look for yet
another doctor. For his daughter was worse again. Preacher s response
to that news was just a mocking allusion to the worried fathers own
words when he used so confidently to hold, ‘Even in Siberia people can
live.* Now that such hope was so obviously denied, Preacher immediately
turned the other mans misery into a vicarious justification of his own
negative attitude to life. So he felt free to gratuitously volunteer the
opinion that the gentleman should not set out to look for a doctor in
such weather and must wait at least until the roads improved, or better,
give up the idea altogether since a good doctor was hard to find in these
parts.

The addressee paid no heed and just drove off as Preacher derided
him as a freak bent on chasing the wind in the fields*. But it was at this
point that the Tartar, who had been listening in silence so far, could no
longer contain his rage. He turned on the old man and poured out all
his pent-up hatred to denounce him as a beast, and as one who was not
alive but dead just like a stone or a lump of clay. The others greeted his
words with mirth and retired to their hut for the night. Left alone by
the fireside the Tartar burst out in an uncontrollable howl.

In the light of this encounter, it seems to me that it would be one-sided
to interpret the cry only as an expression of despair. Even if it may
sound so as the voice of one driven to extremity, it is no doubt predi-
cated at the same time on a stubborn will to life that refuses to give up
hope. That is why for everything he finds so utterly contemptible in
Preacher, there is something the Tartar appreciates in the gentleman-
exile. The way he sees it, the indifference of one to his family stands in

643

The Tartars Cry

contrast to the others affection for his parents, love for his wife, and
care for his ailing daughter. To the emptiness of wanting nothing in
one, the other is opposed by the range and ardour of his desire. One
is just lifeless, brutish matter like stone and clay, the other vibrant with
love of life. The conflict between the two principles, one that denies
life and the other that rejoices in it, could hardly be more pronounced.

The gravity of this antagonism is hard to overestimate, if only be-
cause it touches the very foundation of human existence. For it in-
volves both time and community. Time, because to reduce it to a bare
present without being endowed with a past and with no future on its
horizon is to freeze temporality itself into an abstraction where it is not
possible for life to survive. And community, because, forced out of
history, it would be wanting in the nutriment that the communion be-
tween fellow human beings provides as the very condition for existence
to be possible at all. Since solidarity expressed as a sum of sympathy,
compassion, fellow-feeling and such like, is precisely what generates
such nutriment out of the quotidian histories of human experience, a
community lacking in solidarity destroys itself as something that is no
longer human.

It may not be without relevance, therefore, to read this story written
more than a century ago as a parable for our own time. It helps us not
only to distinguish between the twin theologies of traditional theism
and modernist statism, both driven by a common and not so thinly
veiled greed for power or politics in short. More importantly, it may
help us to learn from Edward Said to be attuned to the exilic condition
sensitively enough not to mistake for terrorism or fanaticism every cry,
individual or collective, heard in a community of migrants, however
desperate it may sound. For that could well be the birth-pang of a
new hope.

The Migrant s Time

To belong to a diaspora ... I wrote down those words and stop-
ped. For I was not sure one could belong to a diaspora. Belong-
ing is predicated on something that is already constituted.
Would the first migrant then remain excluded forever from a diaspora?
Who constitutes a diaspora anyhow? And what is it after all? Is it a place
or simply a region of the mind — a mnemic condensation used to form
figures of nostalgia out of a vast dispersal? Or is it nothing but the ruse
of a beleaguered nationalism to summon to its aid the resources of
long-forgotten expatriates in the name of patriotism? Well, I don’t
know — not yet in any case.

So, to start with let me stay close to the essential connotation of the
term as a parting and scattering and say that to be in a diaspora is
already to be branded by the mark of distance. Somewhat like being
an immigrant, but with a difference. The latter is distantiated from the
community — the people or the nation or the country or whatever the
name of the community — where he finds himself more often than
not as an unwelcome guest. From the moment he knocks on his hosts
door, he is one who has come in from the outside. The diasporan as a
migrant is, on the contrary, someone who has gone away from what
once was home — from a motherland or a fatherland. In this case,
unlike the other, the function of distance is not to make an alien of him
but an aposrate. An apostate, because, by leaving the homeland, he has

Copyright © 1 995 Ranajn Guha. Tex: of a presentation at a Humanities
Research Centre workshop of the Australian National University on 7 August
1995. First published m Postcolonial Studies* 1, 2, 1998, pp. 155-60.

645

The Migrants Time

been unfaithful to it. Since there is no culture, certainly not in South
Asia, which does not regard the home as the guardian and propagator
of values associated with parenthood to the extent of investing the
latter with a sanctity akin to religiosity, desertion amounts to trans-
gression. The migrant, even the involuntary one washed offshore by
circumstances beyond his control, has therefore broken faith and is
subjected to judgements normally reserved for apostasy.

I speak of apostasy in order to highlight the intensity of the moral
strictures heaped by their compatriots on those who have gone away.
The disapproval could be nationalistic or familial in rhetoric and the
defector condemned for weakening in that fidelity which makes for
good citizenship and kinship. Whichever the idiom in which it is ex-
pressed, its object is nothing less than the violation of some sacrosanct
codes. These are codes of solidarity and exchange, alliance and host-
ility, love of neighbours and fear of strangers, respect for tradition
and resistance to change — all of which help a population to form a
community through mutual understanding. Presupposed in every
transaction between its members, these are in effect codes of belonging
by which they identify themselves and recognize each other. To violate
rhese by going away, by breaking loose from the bonds of a native world
is to be disowned and bring down on oneself the harsh sentence: ‘You
no longer belong here; you are no longer one of us/

The voice in which such a sentence is pronounced is that of the first-
person plural speaking for an entire community from a position
entrenched within it. What is within is here — a place the migrant will
not be entitled to call his own. The displacement is made all the more
poignant by the paradox that it corresponds to no distantiation in
time. For it is stapled firmly to an accentuated and immediate present
cut off from a shared past by the adverbial force of ‘no longer. A sharp
and clean cut, the dismissal leaves its victim with nothing to fall back
on, no background where to take umbrage, no actual communitar-
ian links to refer to. For it is in their everyday dealings with one another
that people in any society form such links in a present which conti-
nually assimilates the past to itself as experience and looks forward
at the same time to a future secure for all. The loss of that present
amounts, therefore, to a loss of the world in which the migrant has had
his own identity forged. Ousted temporally no less than spatially, he

646

The Small Voice of History

will, henceforth, be adrift until he lands in a second world where his
place will seek and hopefully find matching co-ordinates again in a
time he, like others, should be able to claim as ‘ our time.

A diaspora’s past is, therefore, not merely or even primarily a hist-
oriological question. It is, in the first place, the question of an indi-
vidual s loss of his communal identity and his struggle to find another.
The conditions in which that first identity was formed are no longer
available to him. Birth and kinship which gave his place in the first
community the semblance of so complete a naturalness as to hide its
man-made character, are now of little help to him as an alien set apart
by ethnicity and culture. Birthmarks of an originary affiliation, these
are precisely what make it hard for him to find a toehold in that living
present where a communal identity renews itself as incessantly in the
day-to-day transactions between people as it is promptly reinforced by
a common code of belonging.

For everything that appertains to such a code is framed in time.
Indeed, belonging in this communitarian sense is nothing other than
temporality acted upon and thought — and generally speaking, lived—
as being with others in shared time, with sharing meant, in this con-
text, as what is disclosed by the community to its constituents as
temporal. One has simply to listen to the discourse of belonging to
realize how pervasive such temporalization is in all that people say or
otherwise indicate to each other about good and bad times, about work
and leisure, about how it was and how it might turn out to be, about
being young and growing old, and more than anything else about the
finitude of life in being born and dying. This is not only a matter of
some linguistic compulsion requiring the grammar of a language to
insist on the aspectual category of verb phrases in an utterance. More
fundamentally, this is an existential question of being in time. There
is no way for those who live in a community to make themselves intel-
ligible to each other except by temporaiizing their experience of being
together.

Temporalization such as this has, of course, all the strands of past,
present, and future inextricably woven into it. However, the migrant
who has just arrived stands before the host community only in the
immediacy of the present. This is so because, from die latters point of
view, whatever (if anything) is known about his past and presumed

(>47

The Migrant's Time

about his future Is so completely absorbed in the sheer fact of his arri-
val that, as an occurrence in time, it is grasped as a pure externality,
mediated neither by what he was nor by what he will be. Yet there is
nothing abstract about this. Quite the opposite seems to be the case.
For, it has the concreteness of a sudden break with continuity, or more
appropriately, if figuratively speaking, that of a clinamen which dis-
turbs the laminar flow of time to create a whirlpool for the strange-
ness of the arrival to turn round and round as a moment of absolute
uncertainty, a present without a before or an after, hence beyond
understanding. Of course it will not be long before the latter recovers
from the shock of suddenness and takes hold of the occurrence by
interpretation — that is, by such codes as may assign it a meaning in
terms of one or any number of alterities ranging from race to religion.
All of which, again, will be phrased, much as was the very last sentence
of rejection addressed to the migrant on the point of departure from
his native land, thus: ‘You don’t belong here.’ Wanting as it is in the
adverbial phrase ‘no longer’, this interdicts rather than rejects. However,
like that other sentence, this too will be uttered unmistakably within
a newness.

How come that the ‘now’ sits on guard at the gate of the host
community as well? It docs so because, as Heidegger says, ‘Belonging-
somewhere ( Hinge-hbrigkeit ) has an essential relationship to involve-
ment/1 Belonging to a community is no exception, for it involves
being with others in the everyday life of an ordinary world. Since the
now is the mode in which everydayness articulates mostly and primarily,
it serves as the knot that ties together the other strands of a community’s
temporal bonding. The past is gathered into this knot and the future
projected from there as well. The now is, therefore, the base from
which all the distantiating strategies are deployed against the alien as
the one who stands outside the community’s time — its past of glory
and misery, its future pregnant with possibilities and risks, but above
all its present charged with the concerns of an authentic belonging.

Nothing could be more acute as a predicament for the migrant who
personifies the first generation of any diaspora. Participation in the

1 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time , trans. John MacQuarrie and Edward
Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), p. 420.

648

The Small Voice of History

host community’s now, that is, a moment of temporality made present
as today, is an indispensable condition of his admission to it. Yet, as
one who has just arrived from the outside, he is, by definition, not ad-
missible at all. For he has nothing to show for his present except that
moment of absolute discontinuity — the foreshortened time of an
arrival — which is conspicuous precisely by its exclusion from the to-
day of the community at whose threshold he has landed. Not a little
of the complexity and pathos of the diasporic condition relates to this
very impasse.

At this point it would be convenient for us perhaps simply to go
round this difficult and embarrassing moment and allow our narrative
a small, almost imperceptible, jump in order to move on to that firm
ground where the migrant, washed and fed and admitted already to his
new community, awaits assimilation as either a mimic or a misfit, de-
pending on the degree of his resistance to that always painful and often
humiliating process. But let us not be tempted by this option. Let us
continue a little longer with our concern for the impasse in which,
literally, he finds himself: stranded between a world left behind and
another whose doors are barred, he has nowhere to go. Homeless and
with little hope left for anything but one last chance, he has all his
orientation and comportment taken over by anxiety.

That is a mood notorious for its unsettling effect. It shakes him out
of the groove of an immediate and unbearable present and makes him
ready to summon the experience of what he has been for an encounter
with the indefiniteness of what lies ahead. In other words, it is anxiety
which enables him to look forward to his own possibilities, helps him
to mobilize the past as a fund of energies and resources available for use
in his project to clear for himself a path which has the future with all
its potentiality on its horizon. A difficult path opened up by the tragic
disjunction of his past and present, it lies across that now from which
he has been excluded so far and posits him there by the logic of that very
crossing.

Thus, the migrant has situated himself at last. But he is far from as
similated yet. For the everydayness of his new situation and that of the
host community’s intersect, but do not coincide. There is a mismatch
which will serve for a field of alienation front now on with differences
read along ethnic, political, cultural, and other axes. This non-coinci-
dence puts a new spin on the problem of the migrants time. Why does

649

The Migrants Time

he now resist absorption in that of his adopted community? Because
it is constituted differently from the latter. For the now of any time
whatsoever arises from the connectedness of the present with the past
and the future. It inherits and projects, and in that dual function
integrates to itself all that is specific to a culture as it has formed so far
and all that will determine its quality and character in time to come.
A community’s now is, therefore, not just one of a series of identical
moments arranged in a steady succession. Aligned by its connectedness
and coloured by the specificities of its overdeterminations, the moment
of its time a community experiences as now is necessarily different
from that of any other.

This is why switching communities is in every instance the occasion
of a temporal maladjustment which, however, is grasped by common
sense, not for what it is, but as the failure of one culture to slot smoothly
into another. There is nothing particularly wrong with this inter-
pretation except that it makes a part stand in for the whole. For what
is cultural about this phenomenon is already entailed in the temporal
and follows directly from it Thus, to cite an all-too-familiar example,
the difference in attitudes to clock time ascribed often so readily to
religious distinctions is perhaps much better explained in terms of the
differing temporalities which connect a community’s understanding
of its own past, present, and future in a manner unlike another’s.

The migrant, too, is subjected to such misinterpretation in the host
community once he has been admitted to it. For the connectedness of
time which makes up the fabric of its life is not and cannot be the same
as in the one he has left behind. As an immigrant — with the prefix
im to register the change in his status as one kept no longer waiting
outside — the sense of time he brings with him is the child of another
temporality. The myriad relationships it has for its referent — relations
to his own people, its traditions and customs, its language, even the
environment of his native land — set it clearly apart from those that
inform such relationships in the community where he finds himself.
His attempt to get in touch with the latter and involve himself in the
everydayncss of being with others is, therefore, fraught inevitably wirh
all the difficulties of translation between accents, inflexions, syntaxes,
and lexicons — between paradigms, for short. All that is creole about
a culture is indeed nothing other than evidence of its creative overcoming
of such difficulty.

650 The Small Voice of History

It is not uncommon for the necessary inadequacy of such translation
to be diagnosed wrongly as nostalgia. The error lies not only in the
pathological suggestion it carries, but primarily in its failure to under-
stand or even consider how the migrant relates to his own time at this
point. Driven on by anxiety, he has only the future in his horizon.
‘What is going to happen to me? What should 1 do now? How am I
to be with the others in this unfamiliar world?’ These are all cogitations
oriented towards what is to come rather than ruminations about what
has been so far.

Lacking as he does the kind of support and understanding one finds
in ones native community, he is entirely on his own with no hinterland
for retreat but only a prospect which faces him with its daunting open-
ness and an indefiniteness which is as promising as it is disconcerting.
All that is in him, and makes him what he is, is caught now — at this
moment in an inexorably forward drift. What he has been so far is also
caught in that drift, but not as dead baggage towed along by a force not
its own. On the contrary, it is itself constitutive of that headlong move-
ment carrying him forward. In that movement the past does not float
passively as a chunk of frozen time, but functions as experience both
activated by and invested in the force of a precipitation. There is noth-
ing in it of any desperate effort at finding what has been lost, but only
an ongoing current in which the past is integral to the present.

The alignment of the migrants past with his predicament in the
flow of his being towards a future occurs, therefore, not as a process of
recovery but of repetition. Far from being dead that past has remained
embedded in its time fully alive like a seed in the soil, awaiting the
season of warmth and growth to bring it to germination. As such, what
has been is nothing other than a potentiality ready to be fertilized
and redeployed. It anticipates the future and offers itself for use, and,
through such use, renewal as the very stuff of what is to come.

That is why the migrant s present, the moment of that tide in which
his future-oriented past is being carried along, draws attention to itself
invariably as the figure of an ambiguity. For at any such moment he still
appears to speak in the voice of the community where he was born to
his first language, even as he is so obviously picking up the language
of the other community where he is about to find a second home.
In all other respects of his comportment as well — the way he dresses,

651

The Migrants Time

works, eats, speaks, and generally conducts himself in his everyday
relationship with others — he mixes idioms and accents and is typecast
as one who defies translation, hence understanding.

Our first migrant is, therefore, in a temporal dilemma. He must win
recognition from his fellows in the host community by participating
in the now of their everyday life. But such participation is made dif-
ficult by the fact that whatever is anticipatory and futural about it is
liable to make him appear as an alien, and whatever is past will perhaps
be mistaken for nostalgia. He must learn to live with this double bind
until the next generation arrives on the scene with its own time,
overdetermining and thereby re-evaluating his temporality in a new
round of conflicts and convergences.

The Turn

In The Question of Palestine (1979) Edward Said speaks of 1967 as
a watershed year’ for his people. The occupation of the West
Rank and Gaza by Israel helped to crystallize their sense of a
common Palestinian identity grounded in the bitterness of dispos-
session. Years later he would describe himself in his memoir as no
longer the same person after 1 967’. A carefree wanderer until then he
was seized, like his compatriots, by the anguish of displacement. For
the first thirty years of his life he had moved from home to home,
school to school, and to some extent job to job, commuting between
cultures and communities in several countries and two continents.
Cosmopolitan itinerancy doesn’t seem to have worried him too much.
In fact, his recollection of those days leaves little doubt that he enjoyed
the open and expansive life not cast in concrete at any particular site.
But the events of 1 967 changed all that and made him realize, as never
before, that once he had a home to call his own, but was homeless now.
This loss, the latest in a series of dislocations suffered by his family and
relatives, was assimilated to ‘the dislocation that subsumed all other
losses’, namely, the loss of Palestine. Henceforth this would be a point
for time and place to intersect in his work and co-ordinate a many-
sided engagement with literature, history, and politics in some of the
most memorable reflections on the human predicament.

That predicament acquires a particularly high profile in the figure
of the exile in nearly all his accounts of Palestine. Indeed it is central

The Turn

653

to the existential concern that aligns each of these narratives in an
unmistakable kinship with his literary essays. It is as if the dissonance
of life calls for a new dialogue between life and literature in the light
of the experience of exile, and Said responds by setting up such a dia-
logue in his studies of the novel that, as Lukics has argued, owes its
form to that very dissonance. This is clearly brought out, albeit on the
limited scale of the short story, in his reading of Conrads ‘Amy Foster
and his use of fiction to make sense of displacement as a significant fact
of modern life.

It is the story of a shipwreck. The boat, packed with migrants lured
by the prospect of jobs and gold, was on its way to America when it
sank off the coast of England. One of the passengers, a poor villager
called Yanko Goorall from Eastern Europe, was lucky enough to be
still alive as the storm dumped him on the beach. The locals made him
feel positively unwanted. However, he managed to find some work and
a place to live, and eventually, we are told, the villagers ‘became used
to seeing him’ even if ‘they never became used to him\ What made him
unacceptable was his foreign ness, expressed in the way he dressed,
walked, sang, talked, or recited the Lord s Prayer — in everything that
stood for language, broadly speaking. In the absence of verbal contact
with the natives and with nobody around to converse with in his own
mother tongue, the young castau ay was trapped in an inescapable
loneliness.

The only chink in the gloom was a relationship that developed be-
tween him and Amy Foster, a village girl who had been attracted to him
at first sight, treated him with much sympathy and kindness, and
helped him at least partly to break out of his isolation. They defied local
opinion to get married. A child was born. All seemed set for a happy
ending when he fell seriously ill. Amy, who had been his only refuge
so far from the incomprehensibility that had cut him off from the rest
of the population, was now affected by it herself. The failure of com-
munication between them became so intense that she could not bear
it any more and walked out with the baby, leaving him to die un-
attended and alone.

It is well known that this story has acquired a particular salience in
Said s work on exile. Thus in his essay ‘Reflections on Exile’ ( 1 984) he
uses it to suggest (as he does elsewhere as well) that Conrad’s own sense

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The Small Voice of History

of alienation led him to identify himself with the castaway and make
the problem of communication central to his plot. The consequence,
in Said’s opinion, has been not only to exaggerate the misunderstanding
between Amy and Yanko but fashion ‘this neurotic exiles fear into
an aesthetic principle and romanticize his death. However, when
he returns to the text nearly fifteen years later in his essay ‘Between
Worlds’ (1998), there is a remarkable change of tone, striking for the
absence of any imputation of romanticism whatsoever. On the contrary,
Conrad is appreciated without reserve for his portrayal of the exiles
sense of ‘loss of home and language in the new setting as a loss that is
‘irredeemable, relentlessly anguished, raw, untreatable, always acute.’
Not a hint of sentimentality here. It is the ‘severity’ of representation
that impresses Said.

What is no less significant is that he unhesitatingly takes his cue
from this very Conradian idea and sets out to write a moving ac-
count of his sense of ‘loss of home and language’ in the rest of the essay.
Among other things, he speaks ruefully about the consequence of set-
tling down to a tenure in the academic profession in America ‘as a way
of submerging my difficult and unassimilablc past’ and the growing
realization that he had thereby accommodated himself to ‘the exigencies
of life in the U.S. melting-pot’ almost to the point of having his pasi
‘annulled’. This, as Adorno had warned, was the fate of the migrant
intellectual. So, with very little time left to him, says Said, he began
to take stock of his past and ‘once again 1 recognized that Conrad had
been there before me.’

This recognition is curious, to say the least. For in his reading of
‘Amy Foster’ and elsewhere, he had been keen so far to distance himself
from Conrad on one critical issue. He did not like the portrayal of the
exile as a much misunderstood romantic hero, which is how he read
it and bel ieved it to have been induced by die author s self-identification
with the fate of those wretched figments of his imagination. But now
his judgement tilts favourably to highlight Conrad s stubborn refusal
to allow exilic pressures to empty his past of its content. In the light of
this resistance, as documented by Said himself, it would appear that
Conrad had indeed been fairly realistic in his depiction of the exile as
a victim of those very pressures. Said, of course, does not acknowledge

The Turn

655

this in so many words. He simply identifies himself with Conrads
predicament just as the latter had done with che exiles. Nevertheless,
the shift, which amounts to a significant turn, catches the reader un-
awares and prompts him to ask what brought it about.

Whether Said had himself noticed any such turn in his thinking is
not clear. However, we have in his writings all we need for an answer
to our question. The first thing to notice is that this particular shift is
not the kind caused by the 1967 war. Said refers to that earlier mo-
ment again and again as a historical benchmark in the life of his people.
It was then that they stepped out of ‘the conventional Arab set-up in
which they had been contained for decades and began to assert a
distinctly ‘Palestinian self-help, self-responsibility, self-identity in the
form of consensus political organizations.’ No longer just refugees,
‘the exiled Palestinians became a political force of estimable significance.’

Said, too, closed ranks with rhem to assume the role for which
he came to be known as perhaps the most eloquent advocate of the
Palestinian cause abroad. Far from being the passive onlooker that he
had been so far, he now became a participant in the resurgent na-
tionalist movement. Like his compatriots, he too was fired by the hope
of the dispossessed to return to the lost homeland and their determi-
nation to act together accordingly. It was a forward-looking vision
with no room in it for the exile as an individual trapped in loneliness
and isolation. If at all, he would figure in it merely as an irrelevant en-
tity liable to be regarded by the activist as somewhat unreal and roman-
ticized.

This perhaps was the image Said saw in Conrad s castaway in 1 984 —
an image of utter dejection that looked so pathetically small and in-
consequential in the background of a rising collective enthusiasm. But
there is a serious problem with this view. It does not take into account
the fact that the perspective of hope mentioned above is not available
to the exile marooned, like Yanko Goorall, in an alien community.
Unlike the mass of the dispossessed he does not have an inexhaustible
fund of ressentiment to provide him with the will and energy to fight
his way out of misfortune. The latter is entirely of his own making —
a failure of judgement on his own part involving an overestimation of
his capacity to cope with the risks of his adventure. He has no one

656

The Small Voice of History

else to blame other than himself. Nor does he belong to a collectivity
on which he can rely for support or solace in his distress. For he has
drifted too far away from his people and the distance grows with time.

That distance means a loss to him for which there is no parallel in
the condition of those displaced en masse by the violence of invasion
or occupation. The loss of homeland does not amount, in their case,
to loss of contact with their own community of native speakers. If any-
thing, the impact of a shared adversity may even have some sealing
effect on the linguistic bond between them and inspire songs of cour-
age and joy to celebrate their engagement in a common struggle. In
fact. Said draws our attention to much the same sort of development
in contemporary Palestinian literature.

By contrast, the exile like Yanko has no possibility at all of commu-
nicat ing in his mother tongue. Entirely on his own among people who
are not only unfamiliar with but hostile to anything that remotely
sounds like it, he is without any means of interlocution whatsoever.
There is therefore nothing he can do to break out of the silence and des-
pair in which he is virtually immured. Condemned to a living death,
he may indeed end up in a ‘solitary death illuminated by unresponsive,
uncommunicating eyes/ This is the other register of exilic predicament,
the staple of Conradian fiction, for which Said does not seem to have
made any allowance in his earlier interpretation.

Eventually, seven years later, he did change registers. This occurred
in 1991 when, as he was to recall it in the essay ‘Between Worlds ,
medical diagnosis ‘suddenly revealed to me the mortality I should have
known about before . . . andlfoundmyselftryingtomakesenseofmy
own life as its end seemed alarmingly nearer/ Conrad s view of the
castaway s death was ro appear to him now in a new light — the darker
light of another depth characterized by the narrator in ‘Amy Foster as
a tragedy. Not the familiar classical Greek kind, it was one of a subtler
poignancy1 generated, he said, as much by ‘irreconcilable differences1
as by ‘that fear of the Incomprehensible that hangs over all our heads —
over all our heads/ The ‘irreconcilable differences1 in this formulation
are easily recognized as what isolated and finally killed Yanko Goorall.
But what does ‘the Incomprehensible1 stand for? As a fear ‘that hangs
over all our heads’, with the last four words reiterated for emphasis, it

The Turn

657

is obviously not limited to exiles alone, but extends to all human be-
ings. The only threat that applies to all of them without exception is
of course death.

Paradoxically, it is the Incomprehensible' that prompts Said, too,
to try and make sense of his own life. It is not the first time that he does
so under an external stimulus. The 1 967 war had led to such a review
of his own past culminating in his identification with the disposses-
sed Palestinians in their agony and their struggle. It was, on his part,
an attempt at self-realization on the public register of exilic experi-
ence. But the exile that the intimation of mortality revealed now as
the hitherto unexamined self was of a different kind altogether. It had
more in common with Conrad, and Said, as he looked back on his life
in the light of the new knowledge, pointed to that existential affinity
by saying: ‘Once again I recognized that Conrad had been there before
me.' This helps no doubt to clarify all of what he meant except for that
single phrase, once again. What are we to make of it when we know
how decisive he has been so far in his judgement that Conrad was led
by his own fear of a solitary death to grossly exaggerate the extent and
intensity of the exiles isolation?

Evidently, there is some ambiguity here. It is not difficult to under-
stand why. For the statement belongs to a period of deep introspection
immediately following the diagnosis of his illness. As we have it from
Said himself, it started with a letter addressed to his dead mother and
culminated three years later in the work that would eventually shape
up as his autobiography. The words that connect him with Conrad as
his predecessor come somewhere between these two poles of atavism
and confession. Who knows what the traveller condemned to the
certainty of a fast-approaching death sees in thar region of light and
shade, and what fugitive patterns catch his eye only to be lost in the
gathering darkness?

As one of those patterns formed in such obscurity, Said s self-identi-
fication with Conrad may not be directly intelligible. But it does make
sense if read in the context of what he has to say about the convergence
of his own experience and Conrad’s. This relates to the latter’s narrative
practice. Conrad, as a storyteller, often chose a narrator, such as Ken-
nedy in Amy Foster, to do the talking for him when it concerned a tale

658

The Small Voice of History

of exile. It was as if he needed someone else and indirect utterance
to act as a buffer between him as an exile and the death to which his
characters were foredoomed as victims of failure in human commu-
nication. A perfectly self-conscious strategy, it was a way of writing
creatively to defer death in the full knowledge of its certainty.

Said seems to have this in mind when he recalls how for years his
critical engagement with Conrad had been like a steady groundbass’
to which much that he experienced was set in counterpoint. But that
was done, as he put it, working ‘through the writings of other people1,
that is, intuitively and without self-knowledge. This set it apart from
Conrad s storytelling mediated by the narrator s voice. For self-know-
ledge was indeed what enabled the great master to play the endgame
on his own terms fully aware that he was going to lose, but that his
loss would not be such as to make death so proud. Said, too, sets out
to know himself, ‘trying’, as he says, ‘to make sense of my own life as
its end seemed alarmingly nearer.’ It was the conscious acknowledge-
ment of an impending end that enabled him to see more clearly than
ever before how his own experience of exile converged with Conrad s.
What the writer and the critic, one as homeless as the other, shared was
their refusal, articulated by each in his own way, to compromise with
the deadly power of alienation and incomprehensibility over minds
and cultures. Ironically, it took the knowledge of death and its terrible
lucidity to enable these two streams of life-enhancing experience to
converge.

Translating between Cultures

Iadies and Gentlemen, as I get ready to speak, 1 must confess to a
certain trepidation. For I know that 1 am addressing a highly
J distinguished audience of social scientists. Once, as a historian,
I belonged to that community myself, less perhaps as a fully paid-up
subscriber than as a classificatory kin. When I graduated with a Mast-
er's degree from Calcutta University in the 1 940s, history was still re-
garded as a classical humanist discipline in the early Renaissance sense
of Humanism. Yet, it could nor resist the drift that had begun with the
first H-bomb and made the post- War generation of scholars believe
that the universal truth of physics would be within their grasp if the
study of the past were recognized as a positivist science. History be-
came a social science, a Faustian contract, and our discipline, once
exemplary for its humanism, lost its soul. The consequences arc now
clear. And as we are rushing to undo the damage done, the role of the
Austrian Academy of Sciences becomes obvious as an institution that
promotes critical inquiry as a necessary condition for opening up and
broadening the space for exchange of ideas between individuals and
cultures. For it stands in a direct line of succession to the most ancient
sceptical tradition of the West, namely, that of the first Academy.

It was such thoughts which were racing through my mind when I
was told about the Austrian Academy of Sciences’ decision to bestow
this honour on my humble work done for South Asian studies, and this

660

The Small Voice of History

led me back into my own past. All 1 found there was an incurably
disobedient child who was a constant source of irritation to the elders
at home and at school. It was my incorrigible habit of asking why about
everything that caused the irritation. This was unacceptable in the
patriarchal social and cultural milieu of India in those days as a British
colony. So I was always reproached as precocious by my guardians. In
fact, I broke so many rules that no one even bothered to ask me why
I went on questioning as I did. Had they done so, I would have told
them that I read somewhere a book recommended by my grandfather,
the patriarch of the family, in which there were stories about Great
Men called Geniuses, and I happened to be impressed by the one about
Socrates where to doubt everything was recommended as a virtue. I
took this to be something well known to the elders and just used it to
show them that I too had grown up.

Thus, it happened that I simply grew up as a sceptic, and as I started
on my academic career in India and then England, colleagues sometimes
found my teaching to be idiosyncratic for it deviated from the syllabus,
while almost always students found it stimulating. Scepticism had
become so much a part of me that, without being self-conscious about
it, I used to teach students to ask why. I remember liberally using a
metaphor for my lessons to advanced students — that of fishing. If you
want to catch big fish, you wouldn’t find it by looking from above. It
merges in the dark of the depth that is completely indistinguishable
from its environment. However, if you look at the bottom, you will see
the underbelly of the beast shining silvery and unmistakable as a target
for harpooning it. It is in honour of this sceptical tradition that we have
gathered here today.

It makes me feel humble to think that the Austrian Academy of
Sciences has thought it fit to find a place for South Asian studies and
the project Subaltern Studies in this tradition. Many individual and
institutional efforts have led to this development. So far as I am con-
cerned, it all seems to have begun with a thesis I wrote in 1963. 1 was
still an economic historian by profession and had started to write a
thesis about a land law in what was British India, and yet as I sat down
to write it, the title came out as The Idea of Permanent Settlement. To
my friends, this was no surprise, and they said — Ah! So Ranajit has
once again done a History of Ideas exercise. Hasn’t he always been a bit

Translating between Cultures 66 1

like that? Well, by that time, long after Husserl and Heidegger, pheno-
menology had indeed established itself as a powerful subject on the
European academic scene, and gradually, together with all the others
in a similar situation, I too found my work classified as History of
Ideas. The question of the subjects autonomy in the knowledge system
had obviously established itself in academic-historical discourse well
enough to testify lo its duplexities, its classical birthmark.

A birthmark, we know since Aeschyius and Oedipus Rex, is the
most unmistakable sign of identity. This is precisely what made social
anthropology, or ethnology, so exciting to the great social scientists of
our time from Bronislav Malinowski to Claude L^vi-Strauss. Both
have defined the parameters of this realm of knowledge in such a way
that their writings are of seminal importance, and, if I had any say in
the matter at all, I would have recommended the formers The Coral
Islands and the latter’s Social Ethnography as texts for advanced work
in my discipline, for these are, in my view, truly ur-texts.

A birthmark is always and necessarily evidence of duplexity. This is
as true of social ethnology as of History itself. For, to be duplex is to
anticipate the question — duplex or ambiguous about what? As in the
case of all anticipation, the meaning of the question is implicit in that
of the what’, which clearly belongs to the realm of possibility. Just as
the subject is already implicit in the yet incomplete meaning of a
sentence before its completion, duplexity of meaning too bears in cell-
form the possibility of completeness. Thus, duplexity works with
meaning as it waits for its Other — that is, Death itself, where alone
man meets his Destiny, the ultimate Other beyond which there is no
knowing the Self. For as Freud had so wisely named it, no one could
know himself or herself better than Oedipus as the king whose sense
of public duty proved stronger than parental obligation or than
Antigone whose sense of community defied patriarchy.

With this, 1 think, we have come to Bronislav Malinowski. For his
life is truly an Oedipian text where fate makes of man an object of pure
contingency without his knowledge. Malinowski s career is arguably
that of the foremost social scientist of the twentieth century. Yet, he is
a rebel: he had a score to settle with patriarchy and was forced by
circumstance to assert it by openly choosing the sense of die place or
community where alone he thought his loyalty belonged.

662 The Small Voice of History

All this happened contingently indeed. For no good reason that
can explain it, Malinowski found himself exiled in a land the British
government of the day considered most reliable for the security of
its empire — a group of Pacific islands which had grown into a colony
inhabited by the Trobriand people. His crime was that he had the
wrong sort of name. Academically speaking, he could not have been
more British and was in fact teaching social anthropology at the
London School of Economics with his very first work recognized by
all as a major contribution to the subject itself. However, as the First
World War broke out, Malinowski came to be regarded, by definition,
as an alien. So he had to be exiled to a land identified with England’s
arch-enemy Germany, but exiled in such a manner that his work could
still be displayed as a continuation of his studies on the Coral Islands
and their place in the tradition of the islanders themselves.

Although his name fell foul by British ears, for Bronislav Malinowski
himself it was, to the contrary, his Balkanesque name that made him
proud enough to seek displacement precisely into the niche where he
belonged by virtue of the sheer originality of his researches. One does
not have to go too far to seek a close parallelism here in yet another
Balkanesque orientation, namely, that in the work of Joseph Conrad.
An alien, again, by British imperial definition, Conrad too would as-
sert his identity proudly as he made a place for himself in an ongoing
story. This was done, of course, in the role of Marlow, ready to take over
the narrative even from the formidable Mister Kurtz, and tell the
reader, as in the Heart of Darkness , one or two things he had seen or
heard himself. He had indeed penetrated the Heart of Darkness and
heard the drums roll at a distance in the night and, as the boat cleared
the bush, he saw the Queen of Darkness herself

It is precisely at this twilight zone ttyat Science met Empire. And the
Coral Gardens and their magic belonged right there — and it s we the
readers who have everything to gain from this encounter. We are the
beneficiaries primarily because it is a fully self-conscious work, if ever
there was one, as a model of science never failing to watch and Jicck
every step taken and constantly revising itself. The result, curiously
enough, is not merely that one has the most authentic fieldwork data
to rely on, but that the information so gathered, checked, filtered, and
corrected over and over again, seems always to come up with new sug-
gestions at every reading.

Translating between Cultures 663

Let me illustrate with an experience entirely my own. As one inte-
rested in magic, 1 had turned once again to the magnificent overview
of his ‘Early Work and Inaugurative Magic’ in the Gardens of Omara-
kana. For brevity’s sake, I had itemized only a few topics on magic,
but my concern had always been the urigubu prestation without
which the critical questions raised in Section 2 (pp. 1 96-2 1 0) regarding
‘Hunger, Love and Vanity as Driving Forces in the Trobriand Harvest
Gift’ could not be answered. What followed, for an answer was a long
and closely argued chapter on the complex structure of Trobriand so-
ciety. This enables the reader to understand why a purely detached
sociological view of gift and exchange leads nowhere, and why
sentiments of lineage, vanity, and attachment act as powerful personal
motives for the urigubu gift and ‘Why the urigubu cannot be a com-
mercial transaction. — Why urigubu contributes to the stability of
marriage. — How urigubu contributes to political organisation.' The
words are the authors and I cite them to demonstrate not only that a
vast and lucid insight into Trobriand society makes them so authen-
tic, but that Malinowski’s own observations as those of the European
sociologist’s are by no means what the Trobriand islander himself
chinks of the urigubu.

Caught in this scintillating review in which the self-question-
ing irony of the professional acadr mic approach shows up for what it
is against the wisdom and experience of the Coral Islanders them-
selves, there’s little one can do except to reflect again on the necessary
duplexity of ethnography that we have already mentioned. The topics
I had carefully picked out on magic now shine in their grandeur to
reveal not only the gaps and omissions between ‘The Method of Field-
work and the Invisible Facts of Native Law and Economics’ (Ch. XI).
They confirm, furthermore, the wisdom of Sections 2 and 3 of that
chapter. Described as ‘An Anthropological Experiment in Detection
(pp. 320-4). — A challenge to the reader — The chaos of unorganiz-
ed facts. — An Autobiography of mistakes . . it is followed up by
the no less tell-tale title, ‘An Odyssey of Blunders in Field-Work’
(pp. 324-30).

Confronted with this fiercely self-critical spirit, my petty academic
worries about what the natives said themselves as against what they
were reported to have said, and similar fieldwork tittle-tatde were
stunned into silence. But thanks to the friendship and generosity of the

664

The Small Voice of History

chief Magician-Gardener, I was invited, as a reader, to two unforgettable
occasions. In both, man is witness to the slow stirring up of nature as
it gets ready to give birth to a new life in the garden. I cite in extenso
the choral lines ( Formula 5), repetitious as they are —

The belly of my garden lifts,

The belly of my garden rises,

The belly of my garden reclines,

The belly of my garden grows to the size of a bush-hens nest,

The belly of my garden grows like an ant-hill,

The belly of my garden rises and is bowed down.

The belly of my garden rises like the iron-wood palm,

The belly of my garden lies down.

The belly of my garden swells,

The belly of my garden swells as with a child.

As the magician explains, this is the positive spell that will ensure the
growth of the gardens throughout the year. However, the ceremony is
not at an end yet. To complete it, it requires a spell ( Formula 6) as he
utters:

I strike thee, O soil, open thou up and let the crops through the
ground. Shake, O soil, swell out, O soil, swell out as with a child, O
soil.

Before passing on, lets stay with this scenario for a moment. For
with Malinowski, one of the most sophisticated social scientists of his
age, we have here a ringside view of an entirely new world being born.
The garden, lying inert with all the rot and decay of winter in its belly,
is at last waking up to the first stirrings of spring. Something akin to
a human childbirth suggests the slow lifting, rising, reclining, grow-
ing of ‘The belly of my garden, as the Magician proudly but yet so
cautiously observes. Its gentle movements rise and fall sometime like
an ant-hill, sometime like an iron-wood palm, but always swelling
with the advent of a life —

The belly of my garden swells,

The belly of my garden swells as with a child.

It is well known that man and nature always speak each others rhetoric,

Translating between Cultures 665

for, as Nietzsche says, we can hardly speak in anything but rhetoric. On
this occasion, we are doing so at the advent of a new life on earth — swell
out, OsoiL swell out , O soil, swell out as with a child. The spectacle stops
us in our track. Not that it is unusual for a human birth and a natural
birth to occur at about the same time. However it is rarely that the two
phenomena would join together to translate the wonder of each to the
other, as they seem to be doing here. To translate! The word comes
easily to mind on this occasion, for the author's reputation as a linguist
is no less formidable than his achievement as a social scientist. In fact,
it is precisely the question of translation that occupies him most in his
book Coral Gardens and their Magic, vol. II: ‘The Language of Magic and
Gardening

Crudely stated, the problem discussed there is all about a digging-
stick. But Malinowski is not happy to call it so. For that would, in his
view, leave out its rich and allusive connotations. Listed by him as an
implement used in gardening (pp. 132-3), it is dayma which could
pass as any stick, short or long, used for digging the soil. It is, thus,
functional rather than formal, in the sense that the emphasis is on use
and not on shape. To paraphrase it in his own words, dayma is a generic
term for any digging implement. Graves and trenches to drain off the
water when a village is flooded, and holes for laying the foundations
of a residential house or yam-house are all dug with the dayma. Thus
the word dayma means ‘digging-stick’ and not simply garden digging-
stick'. But the use made of the dayma in the gardens is much more
important than that of any other gardening tool. Therefore, according
to him, the word dayma brings the gardening context immediately to
the mind of the native.

What this description highlights is precisely the ubiquity of the
term and its generic use. Indeed, it is not possible for the native garde-
ner to think of his days work without the many uses made of this
word. Malinowski acknow ledges this, of course, and that is where his
dilemma lies. For the dayma is not just any digging-stick. To think of
it as such, in English, would be to wrench it out of its semantic orbit
for the native as a word that is simply untranslatable with all the multi-
ple meanings implied in its ancestral, ritual, and technical functions.

The story of the Trobriand digging-stick could have been brought
to a happy ending here, but, as a tribute to the master whose implacable

666

The Small Voice of History

revisionism would not spare even his own self-questioning solutions,
it must be said that the problem of translatability he so brilliantly
formulated has stood the test of time as a paradox. He wants to high-
light and maintain the specificity of the dayma, because it is an ancient
and inalienable tradition. Which is indeed why the word circulates so
easily in the native language. From the routine household chore to
sombre ancestral oblations, it is common currency for the islanders’
social and political exchange and requires no effort to translate ^tradi-
tion. However, as already noticed, it is also untranslatable precisely
because of its ubiquitous, everyday use. Thus, we have both the speci-
ficity that translates as tradition, and the unique that is untranslatable
as the quotidian and ubiquitous.

This paradox may serve perhaps as a fitting conclusion to what we
have to say on this occasion. For, translation, in its proper sense, might
have had something to do with the founders of the Akademie in the
way they set it up. It shows that a paradox that has room enough for
self-critical questioning is precisely where translation must feel at ease
with both sides of an equation eager to act as each others substitute.
As one who could be associated with the Akademie mainly because he
translates between continents and cultures, I feel privileged to pay
homage to that openness which is home to us all.

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